Interview with Jason Parker

+Melbourne Art Review: Tell me a little about your practice. Jason Parker: “Oils will forever be my favorite medium, closely followed by pencil and paper. At the moment I’m trying my hand at sculpture. But at the end of the day whatever I can get my hands on I will try create something out of that. My subject matter is constantly changing and evolving. I don’t know - I just paint whatever I feel at the moment. I was always drawing and painting as a child. Fast forward a few years and I found myself as a graphic designer but severely unhappy. It was around this time I picked up the paint brush again after many years as a way to deal with and express my feelings at the time. It wasn’t long before I made the decision to close the door on graphic design and focus on primarily on art. Coming to the decision was a bit of a revelation, I have since poured myself completely into my art putting in an obscene amount of man hours in the short time I have been pursuing it.” +mar: Can you tell me a bit about your process in creating a work? JP: “It changes from time to time. Sometimes I start with a clear idea and a preliminarily sketch, and will follow these through to ‘till the final product. Sometimes it’s chaos, I will let my subconscious take over with no real clear vision or direction and just roll with it. it’s a constant push and pull. I’ll push something as far as I can, and then reign it in and then push it out again and then reign it in, once i feel happy with the balance, I call it and that’s when it’s ‘finished’. It’s quite a hard thing to do as a young artist to just know what you’re going after and how to achieve it, and then just walk away. I have ruined a whole lot of paintings by not knowing when to call it and consequently overworking it. I have a show coming up at Off The Kerb Gallery. The show is called ‘Just Passing Through’ and is a collection of paintings and sculptures, with the central theme of a fragmented reality and the wondering of the mind. The show also has an underlying theme of the play of opposites in my life and in my work. The chaos, the refined and so on.” +mar: How do you keep your practice sustainable? JP: “I have a “day job”, it’s casual and I only work 3 or 4 days. I would rather not. But it’s what I have to do, so be it.” +mar: What are you inspired by at the moment? JP: “This is a hard one. It’s constantly changing, there are a few like Kent Williams, Andrew Hem, James Jean, and the man child himself David Choe - whose art, when I came across it, was instrumental in me picking up the paintbrush again. There are so many local artists and it’s changing all the time, but I admire TwoOne a lot, not only for his art but his approach to art. His show last year at Backwoods gallery was my favorite show of 2014." +mar: Do you have any advice for other young creatives? JP: “Firstly forget the word ‘inspiration’, drop it from your vocabulary. I hear the phrase ‘I’m just not feeling inspired at the moment’ way too much. This is no excuse - always be working, always be honing your craft. Inspiration will come and go, and the work you put in between these times will show when inspiration hits. Your work should engulf your life, don’t watch T.V, stay off social media, restrict the amount of socializing your doing. Seriously I can’t stress this point enough. Work. Work. Work.” We are lucky with Melbourne to live in a city where art is so celebrated. There are a lot of opportunities for young artists in Melbourne, which in turn means you have a lot more people pursuing a career in art. I feel like the ‘art world’ is very flooded at the moment, its a saturated market. Sometimes it feels like the tide is against you and your lost in a sea of art and artists all fighting for the same position, to get noticed, to make a name. Most of you won’t make, that’s a fact it’s enough to kill the desire to create. Thankfully I live in a bubble of delusion where I believe I can be the exclusion to the rule.” +mar: What’s next for you Jason? JP: ”Well, after any show, I’ll put down the paintbrush for a while and sketch a lot - going back to basics, so to speak, in the hope to add to the visual library. Apart from group shows and commissions I’m going to put out a few prints this year so keep an eye out for those.” +mar: Well good luck with it all. Thanks for chatting with us.