NEW YORK, NY.- For Esther III, Adams and Ollman presents new works by Bethann Parker. Her visionary paintings reveal a spiritual connection to the landscape. Each explores the rich space between nature and abstraction, enveloping figurative forms in explosive brushwork, shape, and color. The works, buzzing with energy and emotion, unfold at the intersection of nature and spirituality, conveying a worldview of interconnectedness.
Parker's work draws on American modernism, transcendentalism, Christian theology, feminism, and the occult, while remaining grounded in the artist's own unique spirituality and surroundings, and shaped by an intimate, intuitive, and exploratory process. The artist proposes painting as a form of inquiry, one that probes the dynamics of perception and belief, the external landscape and the inner life, the animate and the inanimate, the observable and the unknowable. Searching and open-ended, the work offers a contemplative space in which the material and the metaphysical are held in tension.
Small in scale, these mystical and surreal landscape paintings are built with thick impasto brushstrokes, luminous passages of color, and an abundance of decorative patterning made from delicate "threads" of paint that resemble embroidery stitches. Working in layered applications of paint, Parker builds surfaces slowly, often allowing earlier gestures to remain visible beneath subsequent marks. This process of accumulation lends the work a palpable sense of duration, as if each painting records its own becoming. Her handling of color—at times luminous and expansive, at others restrained and atmospheric—further shapes the spatial and emotional register of each piece. Recurrent motifs—vessels, portals, seeds, and radiant geometries—act as visual anchors that function less as fixed signs than as points of orientation within a broader field of associative thinking, allowing each painting to operate as a site of emotional and perceptual inquiry.
Parker is sensitive to the rich geological history of the area in and around the Appalachian Mountains, one of the world's oldest mountain ranges, where she currently lives and works. The varied geology of the region—including folded and thrust-fault sedimentary rocks, volcanic rocks, and ancient ocean floors—inspires the artist's layered, dynamic, and experimental textures and topographies. Parker's practice is inseparable from her way of life; she grows her own food, forages for materials for her paintings and, in general, lives close to the land—a rootedness that surfaces in her paintings as an almost tactile attunement to the natural world.
Bethann Parker (b. 1984, Montgomeryville, PA; lives and works in Saylorsburg, PA) has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Rachel Uffner, New York, NY; Fleisher/Ollman, Philadelphia, PA; and Art at King Oaks, Newtown, PA. Parker received a BFA and Certificate of Fine Art from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and a Certificate from the Barnes Foundation, both in Philadelphia, PA. She has been the recipient of the Kittredge Fund, the Freeman's Exhibition Award, the Louis S. Fine Purchase Prize, and the Richard C. Von Hess Memorial Travel Scholarship.
