NELL PARKER

Oil Painting and Printmaking

Nell Parker’s childhood experiences hiking in the woods and playing along the shores of Maine awoke in her a deep love of ecology and the close observation of the natural world. After receiving a Human Ecology degree from College of the Atlantic she pursued art studies at Maine College of Art, University of Southern Maine, Pacific Northwest College of Art and Portland State University. She has shown work in galleries in Portland, Oregon as well as in Maine.

Primarily working in oil paint, Nell’s current work seeks through the use of scale and viewpoint to bring new perspectives to the landscape genre. In her miniature works, a moment spent in the vastness of nature is reduced to a tiny image that can be held in your hands, in effect becoming a talisman that focuses and distills. The sculptural aspect of the burl wood gives deeper meaning, referencing the trees often depicted in the paintings and the underlying swirling, chaotic nature of reality. In her larger paintings, she takes something small or unnoticed, such as the forest floor that we walk on, and makes it larger than life, raised to eye-level, and thus elevated to its true importance.