Renaissance Woman> Multifaceted Hampden artist pushes the envelope, and the cards

loading...

Temple Parker sees how things connect.

Whether it’s the molecular structure of a cell or a person’s place in the universe, the Hampden artist understands. She can see where science and spirit overlap, where a simple shape becomes a complex pattern, where one thing becomes another.

For Parker, each piece is a chance for a metamorphosis. She can turn stars into diamonds, a feminine symbol into a body, a cell into an uncharted landscape, a chalkboard into a canvas. All with a paintbrush.

“I’m interested in transforming things,” Parker said. “I like trying to conceptualize things in different ways.”

Take a deck of playing cards. Pretty simple, right? Well, yes, if you want to play the same old card games. But Parker has another idea. For a year, she’s been painting the designs for a new deck of cards, with the usual suits and an extra feature: the alphabet. That way, you can play word games, card games or both, and get some nice artwork in the deal.

“I like that idea – whatever hand you get is partially an element of chance,” she said. “[It’s] taking one thing and making it into something else. The same thing can be used in a different way.”

This is the thread that connects all of Parker’s work – using the same things differently, turning ordinary things into extraordinary images.

In addition to the cards, Parker is working on a set of “cellscapes.” From electron micrographs, the images produced when cells are viewed in an electron microscope, she is creating vivid paintings that resemble flowers or tide pools. The micrographs show the most minute part of cells in shades of gray. Viewed up close, the cell’s components look lifeless, colorless and flat.

Not in Parker’s work, though. She adds color and depth, using the micrograph as a starting point rather than trying to copy the image.

“One thing you can do with paint and color is create a sense of movement and dynamism,” Parker said. “It is kind of a challenge to do these cellscapes, trying to get these still, static photographs to convey a sense of movement.”

Jane Madigan, a family friend, said it’s no surprise Parker is able to get the movement across.

“Nothing is static in [her] life,” Madigan said while sitting in on an interview with Parker in her father’s Hampden home, where Parker works and lives.

“I don’t think anybody’s is,” Parker replied.

Both Parker’s body and mind seem like they’re in constant motion. During the interview, she ran upstairs and downstairs, hauling out paintings and pulling them off the walls to demonstrate what she was talking about. She speaks excitedly and eloquently about spirituality, science, art, nature and literature. She’s intelligent and intensely alive, and her exuberance spills over onto her canvases.

“If I’m really being honest with what I do, I’ll paint what I want, which is basically everything,” Parker said. “It’s a way to understand what it is to be human. I guess that’s where the spirituality comes in.”

Parker, who has painted since childhood, combined art and spirituality for her senior thesis in comparative religion at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn. For her thesis, Parker expanded on her studies of “The Interior Castle,” a mystical theology text written by St. Teresa of Avila in the 16th century.

In the text, St. Teresa writes: “I began to think of the soul as if it were a castle made of a single diamond or of very clear crystal, in which there are many rooms, just as in Heaven there are many mansions.”

Parker used a piece she painted the previous semester, also titled “The Interior Castle,” as a point of departure. In this piece, Parker starts with a single shape, a star, which she overlaps until the design forms a diamond at the center.

“Finding a structure that you can show meaning is the fun thing to me,” Parker said.

She repeated the technique with several shapes, including a cross, and earned high honors for the thesis. After graduation, she continued to explore the transformation from pattern to subject, overlapping feminine symbols in a circle to form a chalice in the “Body and Blood” series.

But Parker, whose own spiritual beliefs are drawn from several religions and philosophies, doesn’t only focus on matters of the soul. Her subjects come from matters of interest at the time of the painting – eating disorders, nature, memory, science, psychology. As for media, she uses acrylics and oils, pencils and pens, paper and canvas, even chalkboards – whatever works. Her techniques are as varied as her tools, ranging from patterns to realistic portraits to pretty angels and abstract figures.

“Sure, I could go out and paint landscapes, but I had other ideas and I wanted to paint ideas,” Parker said. “Different people respond to different things, so I wanted to reach as big an audience as I could. [The diversity comes from] wanting to prove that I can do different things … while at the same time applying my own sense of what I like.”

One of Parker’s patrons, Greg Carr of Cambridge, Mass., said her abstract work is most appealing to him.

“What I like best about her paintings is she always has some fascinating, occasionally mystical theme or feeling through them,” Carr said. “I really enjoy the paintings. In fact, I think it’s time for me to probably collect a few more.”

Carr is one of several patrons whom Parker met while living in Boston and Cambridge. Daniel Schacter, a Harvard psychology professor whose renowned collection includes works based on memory, owns two of Parker’s pieces.

“It’s kind of amazing,” Parker said. “For me, [memory is] sort of a wellspring. You have all these things that you carry around with you and that influence you.”

While she still has connections in Boston, Parker found that it’s easier to be a full-time artist in Maine, so she moved back. Parker was born in Canada and moved to Dover-Foxcroft when she was 12. The family later moved to Hampden.

Locally, the reception to her work has been warm. She will show her paintings in the Edythe Dyer Community Library in Hampden in January and February. My Maine Bag in the Bangor Mall is selling her cards and several of her paintings. She also runs an online gallery of her paintings (www.tanglewave.com) and a shop that sells her greeting cards and playing cards (www.templecards.com).

For Parker, the artist with boundless ideas and energy to match, moving back has given her a chance to explore all the topics she wants to explore while meeting people who are interested in her work.

“When you’re up here, the small-world thing happens faster,” Parker said. “When I live in Maine things start happening quickly. People want to buy [art] from people they’ve actually met.”