Wilma Parker’s Navy
Wilma Parker might seem an unlikely chronicler of military beauty. She is a San Francisco flower child who came to the city in the 1960s and stayed. She loves California light, the panels of color that reflect off the ocean, the blue-grays of the sky. And she paints them in an idiom that owes more to the collages of Robert Rauschenberg than it does to the tradition of Naval realism.
Yet, Parker’s bohemian affections are precisely what make her paintings so powerful. For many years the phrase “painting the navy” has meant painting ships: clearly, brightly, on a stage of rough seas and high winds, hard at work. For Parker though, painting the navy means painting much more than the dynamic energy of its machines. It means painting the men and women who work on the ships, the children and families of sailors, and above all, the forces of nature with which they contend.
The foremost of those forces is time itself. In Parker’s paintings, fighter jets explode off carrier decks and ships slip gracefully into their home ports – and yet, they seem also to fade back into the surface as if receding into the past. Parker’s images are as delicate as nineteenth-century snapshots and the men and women in them, as lovingly witnessed.
And this is perhaps the governing irony of Parker’s work. She brings the high individualism of the counterculture in which she came of age to one of our country’s most complex collective projects: the Navy. In the process, she reveals not only its mechanical power, but its human beauty.
Fred Turner
Associate Professor
Departments of Communication and, by courtesy, Art and Art History
Stanford University
Dear Trustees,
You are cordially invited to attend a gallery talk and opening of the work of former trustee Wilma Parker de Pavloff on Wednesday, December 8th here at RISD in the Memorial Hall Painting Gallery. The gallery talk starts at 4:30 pm and the opening at 5:30 pm.
Wilma's work was recently exhibited at the Newport Naval War College Gallery. Her exhibition, entitled Painting the Navy (see Paintings tab), was well-received. A review noted that she paints "in an idiom that owes more to the collages of Robert Rauschenberg than it does to the tradition of Naval realism. ...Her images are as delicate as nineteenth-century snapshots and the men and women in them, as lovingly witnessed."
Please join us for this special occasion.
Best regards,
Ellen
Ellen Hallett
Director, Trustee Office
Rhode Island School of Design