Vicken Parsons

This beautiful book is a demonstration of painting’s power to evoke emotion and sensation even when on the smallest of scales.

British artist Vicken Parsons (b.1957) makes small, intimate paintings on wood panel using thin layers of oil paint. Her subjects are usually partial views of interior spaces or landscapes, some remembered and others imagined. Details of rooms such as corners or doorways or glimpses of fleeting clouds conjure up worlds that are expansive yet claustrophic. Her paintings are quiet and meditative in mood, but also richly evocative, drawing in the viewer through their expressive brushwork, instinctive interplay of colour and light, and unnerving tension between surface and depth. Parsons’ work has beguiled and inspired writers from the fields of art, psychoanalysis, and literature to attempt to interpret it, to distill it, for more than twenty years. Their responses to her ‘visual poems’ are gathered here for the first time, in the artist’s only retrospective monograph. All of her most celebrated paintings are reproduced, alongside some of her drawings, until now never shown, and sculptural works – or ‘painted objects’ as she calls them – that see the artist extend her pictorial investigation of space, reflection, and illusion into three-dimensional form. Studio photographs show some of the work in progress.

Contributors include: Michael Archer, David Batchelor, Iwona Blazwick, Darian Leader, Richard Morphet, Anna Moszynska, Charlotte Mullins, Annushka Shani, Rachel Spence, Edmund de Waal.