About Artist Parks Reece
Artist Parks Reece at home in Montana
Parks Reece is an extraordinarily gifted artist whose distinctive paintings, lithographs, and prints represent a complete aesthetic and reflect a sense of humor that is both original and great. Dubbed a “modern mythological surrealist,” the Livingston, Montana, artist fairly bristles at the label, yet acknowledges that “you have to have a classification and I seem to have been lumped in with the surrealists.”
Reece’s parodies inject humor into subjects traditionally considered oh-so-serious, making him a hero of environmentalists and others who appreciate the complexities of the human role in our natural world.
“I would never categorize myself as an environmental artist, but when the paint dries I often find that the work is relevant to environmental issues. I sort of dabble in modern mythology by juxtaposing the old myths of the West with the new things that are going on. It’s part of an ancient tradition – that of adding levity to gravity.”
Born in Wilkesboro, North Carolina, Reece began his art career at the age of three under the eye of his mother, Gwyn Reece, and Ruth Shaw, who developed finger painting as both an art form and a psychoanalytic tool. Finger painting, along with other traditional techniques, gave way to a technique similar to frontage.
By applying numerous layers of acrylic pigment to fibrous paper, Reece creates sub-paintings that are multihued and multidimensional. Some of these are more than 20 years in the making. Using traditional brush techniques, the process is continued by highlighting physical features – cliff faces, brushy gorges, river bottoms – that Reece finds in the sub-painting. Then come the characters–typically animals–whose on-canvas personalities and human traits provide an odd embrace of anthropomorphism.
Between his early years as a finger-painter and his current work in painting and lithography, Reece studied art for two years at East Carolina University, then at the Universidad National in Costa Rica. He continued his education in San Francisco, earning a degree from that city’s prestigious Art Institute.
Faced with dicey career opportunities involving either the Merchant Marines or ranch work, Reece opted to become a cowboy who spent his off hours creating murals on the walls of professional buildings in Sheridan, Wyoming. That led to a job in Lodge Grass, Montana, where he was hired to supervise Crow Indian kids who were painting murals at their high school. Reece then taught art to teenagers living in the industrial housing projects of North Wales. A bicycle tour of France and Italy followed and when he returned to Montana, he settled in Gardiner, a town on the border of Yellowstone National Park, where elk and buffalo outnumber people.
In 1980, Reece became director of the Danforth Gallery, a nonprofit arts education facility in Livingston, Montana. He spent four years there, booking shows and introducing a variety of art and artists to the community. In the meantime, Reece continued to hone his own talents as he developed his unique style of art. Since 1984 he has focused exclusively on his own art. Reece’s work has been exhibited, and is in private collections, across the United States, Canada, and Europe. It has also appeared nationally in numerous magazines as well as in books and on book covers. In 1997, Reece began his series of enthusiastically received limited edition original lithographs, produced at Deep Creek Productions, Russell Chatham’s lithography studio in Livingston, Montana.
What People Are Saying
“Parks Reece is an artist who is continually growing and improving. He is fanciful, authentic, and his work is dynamic without the slightest trace of trendiness. He researches his subjects personally and thoroughly and his paintings reflect his own flamboyant lifestyle and intense interest in life. Parks pokes gentle fun at not only an often silly world in general but himself as well. Reece is pure and uncontaminated, he is sincere as still a child, although not childish. His expression is a mixture of a type of contemporary surrealism and whimsical folk art, delightfully mystical and original.”
— Floyd T. DeWitt, winner of the National Sculptor Society’s Gold Medal award
“There’s definitely something gloriously wrong with artist Parks Reece. I mean, just look at his work. Here’s training and talent shackled to an altogether peculiar perception of our natural world. The result is a bizarre amalgam of Charley Russell’s subject matter and Salvador Dali’s pragmatism. Livingston residents feel it is good that Parks Reece should create such work. He enriches us; he amuses us; he walks among us every day and doesn’t cause much trouble at all.”
— Tim Cahill, author and contributing editor Outside, Rolling Stone, and Esquire magazines
“To say that Parks Reece is a wildlife artist is to say that Georges Seurat painted picnics. Parks combines high art and low jinx to give us a new vision of the American West.”
— Steve Chapple, author, contributing editor Sports Afield, producer/director/host of Under The Big Sky
“Parks Reece has diligently devoted himself to a life in art, one which casts a most unique shadow. Using imagery straight from nature, he has pulled, twisted and otherwise juggled it into shapes of thoughtful commentary, irony, droll humor, and sometimes outright belly laughs. And while doing so, he employs good drawing and beautiful color. Right after Parks was made, they broke the mold.”
— Russell Chatham, artist, author, publisher, and restauranteur
“Parks Reece is a truly extraordinary artist whose work I have been following for more than 20 years.”
— Jim Harrison, author and screenwriter
“The current work of Parks Reece is as bright as a sunny morning after a week of rain. His detailed paintings have all the technical facility and design savvy of a trained and serious artist. What makes them special is the wit. Not since the work of the great English illustrators – Hogarth, Cruikshank, Thomas Rowlandsan – can I remember seeing such a happy combination of artistic ability and humor. Without resorting to caricature, Parks has created a body of work, not only lovely to look at, but also profoundly funny. Until seeing these new paintings, I believed it was only the great cartoonists of the twentieth century who were keeping alive this treasured, irreverent tradition. In the hands of Parks Reece, fine art becomes fun once again, and God bless him for that.”
— William Hjortsberg, novelist and screenwriter
“…Reece has become something of a legend, and his paintings are collectors’ items.”
— Todd Wilkinson, Wildlife Art News
“Parks Reece is a painter with poetic wit who we can never have enough of. He is a sure-footed nonconformist whose individuality of thought is as unmistakable as a fingerprint.”