ST. PETERSBURG, FL.- The Mindy Solomon Gallery presents the paintings of American abstract artist Erin Parish July 20-September 14.
"Touch is the other side of movement. Movement is the other side of touch. They are the shadow of each other." - Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen
Erin Parish is the daughter of four artists. As a child growing up, common talk on Sunday mornings centered on the New York Times and the art world and its philosophical and commercial vacillations. Parish listened intently and began to form significant and lasting opinions about art and the pathways of creative thinking. She has been exhibiting regularly since the age of eighteen and is now nearing her fourth decade of being a practicing artist.
Her early influences ranged from Joseph Cornell to the German Expressionists and Neue Wilde artists of the 1980s. Today she is very much taken with the Hudson River School artists as well as Moriko Mori, Yayoi Kusama, and Japanese woodcuts by Hokusai and Hiroshige. She finds herself aligned with the Japanese principles of Wabi Sabi and Yugen.
Parish describes her paintings as follows: "I create art based on what I stumble upon in nature. What might appear mundane on the surface can be complex and beautiful upon closer inspection. People seldom notice the reflection in a puddle or the dewdrops on a leaf, but every component is a microcosm of nature in its entirety. Nature is composed layers upon layers of interconnected ecosystems. Every aspect is constantly evolving, but nature’s motion is often only clear to us at a larger scale. On the cellular level, the change in fall foliage starts unseen by us. With the new green of buds come an awareness of the approach of spring. My artwork responds to nature’s continuous circle of flux. I try to capture and preserve a moment that passes too quickly for most of us to see.”
Parish lives on Miami Beach and gathers much inspiration from her environment. Her meditative, ethereal works convey liquidity and tranquility evocative of the ocean. With an ever-shifting palette of colors that seem to move and transform on the surface, Parish creates a sense of time and space that inspires a moment of quiet.
