About

John A. Parks is an English painter who was educated at the Royal College of Art in London. He began exhibiting at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibtitions while still a graduate student and achieved immediate success as a portrait painter, undertaking the famous Pear’s Portrait Commission as well as many private commissions. Parks moved to New York in the late seventies and has exhibited widely in the United States and Britain over the last forty years. His work is distinguished by his determination to move on through a variety of approaches and styles while circling many of the same themes, most of which are dominated by imagery from his boyhood in England. His painting is represented in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design and the Royal College of Art, London as well as numerous private collections. His work has received universally positive reviews. Writing in the New York Times in 1982 John Russell dubbed him "...a true poet in paint." In 2012 Roberta Smith, also writing the New York Times hailed his work as "...a joy to discover."

Parks has been a member of the faculty of the School of Visual Arts in New York since the early 1980s, where he teaches courses in portraiture, realist techniques and drawing. He has also taught courses and workshops at the New York Academy of Art, the Fashion Institute of Technology and the Art Students League.

In addition to his work as a painter, Parks has published many articles on art and travel in publications ranging from the New York Times to American Artist magazine to catalogue essays for the Smithsonian Museum of American Art. In 2014 he published Universal Principles of Art (Rockport Publishers), a book that provides a broad introduction to the world of art. Parks’ painting is represented by 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel in New York. He makes his home in Dutchess County, New York.

This website provides an archive of the artist’s work since 1977—from the early cityscapes, through his lyrical and romantic garden paintings, his riotous “Havoc” paintings, up to his latest pictures.