Justin Parks: Art

ABOUT

I am an artist born and living in Madison, WI.   My practice is a process of formulating a theme, generating a representative image through collage, then adapting that collage into a larger painting.  The paintings incorporate repeated imagery (featureless bodily forms, moons, grass, ambiguous spheres, etc.), as well as a constant employment of grayscale passages.  I have fallen into frequent use of grayscale in my paintings which I make by scrubbing and shading graphite over white paint with my fingers. The finger-painting aspect of this process is deeply satisfying and reminds me of some much older, ancient process of art-making to which I feel a kinship.  This has become the primary characteristic of my pieces and emerged as a result of years developing black and white photographs, which was my introduction to visual art. In my work, I aim to grow a loosely-figurative symbolic lexicon in order to tell the small but vital stories of the interior world.

I graduated from UW-Madison in 2017 with a BA in English Literature and a Certificate in Studio Arts, and am currently an Exhibit Technician at the James Watrous Gallery.