It taught Parkes that representation was the way out of the artistic dilemma that Abstract Expressionism had led him into. Representation did not necessarily confine the painter to a crippling kind of literalism: something in a painting could be at once literally depictive and a metaphor for something wilder and stranger. The painter could show us the scene, and at the same time invite us to explore what lay beyond it. At last Parkes’s extraordinary imagination – something he had lived with ever since childhood – could be liberated without shame or self-consciousness. Parkes started painting again, but this time in the minutely realistic style for which has subsequently become known worldwide.

“Realistic” applies only to the style, however, not the subject matter. The dreamy boy, enclosed in his own imaginings of fantastic animals, remote yet erotically potent beauties, moons and stars and strange celestial manifestations, and the occasional slightly sinister grotesque, has grown into the man unashamedly ready to follow his own visionary gleam. In the intervening period he had read and travelled, delved deep into religions far remote from his conventional Mid-Western Christian upbringing, and taken aboard a lot of New Age speculation, ranging from White Witchcraft to Astrology Eastern and Western.

His mind, once opened, might have closed in again on one particular system. But it didn’t. Take the most widely known and followed for example, astrology. He is amused but not dismissive when one points out to him that his birthdate, October 12 1944, marks him out as a Libra by Western reckoning, a Monkey governed by the element Wood according to the Chinese horoscope. That should make him in Western terms a seeker of balance in all things, even if balance achieved only after much violent oscillation between extremes. In Chinese astrology, the Monkey is the inventor, the improviser par excellence, but also possesses the moderating gift of definition, so that his wildness of invention can always be curbed by a strong sense of practicality, to produce something with clean outlines and sharp edges.

Combining the two should give us the perfect indicator of how his art might be expected to develop. And sure enough, so it does. Not so sure that Parkes accepts his dual horoscope as what predestined him to be the artist he is. It may be so, he concedes. But then again, it may not. Even as a child, Parkes had an intensely practical side to his nature, so that to an outward view he was a very sensible, capable young man. He merely had this extra, secret resource. He read fairy stories, fantasies and science fiction voraciously, and his mind was coloured but not dominated by what he read. If someone had the temerity to complain that he just did not see things the way Parkes did, his answer would no doubt be, like Turner’s when confronted by the lady who failed to see anything Romantic in a steam train crossing a bridge, “No, but don’t you wish you did?”

Nowadays Parkes tends to talk down his technical expertise, but we should not forget that he began his post-art school career instructing his contemporaries, and sometimes his seniors, in graphic techniques, which argues that already, in his early twenties, he was exceptionally well equipped with technical knowhow, and this is further attested by the speed and sureness with which he took up the difficult medium of the stone lithograph, which brooks few uncertainties and second thoughts. But first he needed to walk before he could run, and for the first year or so of his self re-invention as a painter he simply worked quietly side-by-side with his new painter friend José Manuel, working for himself rather than the public, while the economic needs of the family were taken care of by the leatherwork, with which they were now so successful that they ran a workshop with several employees.

It seemed to Parkes at the time, as to everyone else who knew anything of his history, that he was going through the difficult birth-pangs of a totally new kind of artist. Technically that may have been true, but philosophically things were not so simple. In his Abstract Expressionist days, after all, he was fundamentally practising a species of what the Russian Revolutionary artist Kasimir Malevich called the representation of a non-objective world. What this meant for Malevich was making pictures of black or red squares against a white background, or of disks which might or might not be read as suns or moons. Whatever it was to anyone else, to him it was representation. The Abstract Expressionists took off from there, manipulating shapes and colours that stood for nothing but themselves.

When Parkes returned to a more conventional form of representation, it was basically not much different: he was still drawing and painting things unlike anything one had ever seen in the outside world, only this time all vagueness had been abandoned. The English composer/artist Lord Berners once mischievously described a Surrealist painting as laying out “on the pale yellow sands…a thing that is almost a Thing”. The “things” in Parkes’s later paintings and lithographs go one better. They are not “almost” anything, but very fully and precisely occupy their own space, even before Parkes had gone one step further, by taking up sculpture. The two-dimensional images are already extremely specific. They could almost be described as photo-realistic, except that they are of something no one could hope to photograph, in this or any other world.

So who or what are the inhabitants of this strange new world Parkes leads us graciously into? A beautiful woman is a beautiful woman, whatever the circumstances, and there are certainly enough of them in Parkes’s own personal vision.  But how many of them are just beautiful women? Even if they do not have wings or horns, they seem to come from some Valhalla (many are clearly warrior women, kin to the Amazons), or maybe from the slopes of Mount Olympus, where gods and demi-gods engage in the gentler arts of music and dance. Or again, from some obscure corner of the Hindu pantheon, where supernatural beings may sprout supernumerary limbs without losing an iota of charm or grace.

But these elegant creatures do not live alone in this mysterious space, somewhere between heaven and earth. There are also strange male beings, often dressed like a refugee from the commedia dell’arte, or as a jester or a court dwarf. These make a sort of bridge between the radiant and the shadowy-sinister. And when we come to the animals, almost anything goes. If the lion does not exactly lie down with the lamb, the hypogryph seems to be on friendly terms with the domestic cat, the monkey with the swan, the hound with the sphinx. Not to mention intermediary forms, in which an owl has human features, or a bull grows feathers to fly with. Why should they not regard the air as their medium quite as much as earth, in this world of gravitas without gravity?

And where exactly do all these mysterious encounters take place? In Parkes’s mind, of course. But beyond that, can they be located somewhere, if only somewhere in art history? Parkes is very much an isolated figure, definitely sui generis. Always more of a painter than an illustrator, he does not really belong among the numerous European designers of advanced, adult graphic novels and strip cartoons, where one might at first be tempted to place him. Compare him with even the best of them, such as Mobius or Theo van den Boogaard, and the difference is immediately apparent.  His technique is more painterly, his imagination much less tied within the confines of narrative. In fact, narrative is the last thing one thinks of, confronted with one of Parkes’s images – even when, as in some of the earlier works, there seems to be some very generalised reference to a specific myth, such as that of Perseus and Andromeda or St George and the Dragon.

Parkes’s works are more interested in evoking an atmosphere, or capturing his figures on the point of unguessable action rather than right in the middle of something we can all too easily be persuaded we should guess at. This would seem to locate him, rather, among the so-called Victorian Olympians, those painters of an imaginary Classical world in which beautiful, scantily-clad women lounged around accompanied sometimes by exotic but perfectly recognisable pets like large cats or delicately feathered birds. Among the likes of Lord Leighton and Albert Moore, the Anglo-Dutch Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema seems most closely akin to Parkes. Alma-Tadema’s vignettes of life in ancient Greece and Rome seldom have any precise reference to myth or even history, and pay as detailed attention to the settings as to the people. Parkes, like Alma-Tadema, has developed outstanding skill in the rendering of veined marble and the textures of various fabrics as they cling to or fall from the curves of his remote yet inviting female figures.

But as Salvador Dali, of all people, once observed, “the one thing we cannot avoid being, however hard we try, is a modern artist”. With Parkes we may be reminded, now of some Victorian, now of Botticelli, now of Tiepolo, now (though much more infrequently) of Goya. But all of these, though Parkes has undoubtedly observed them, have been absorbed into an entirely modern sensibility. If we were looking for a twentieth-century stalking horse, we might well look to Surrealists like Dali and Magritte, or to artists from the Neue Sachlichkeit, such as Otto Dix or Christian Schad,

There is one important distinction, however. In Surrealism or Neue Sachlichkeit there is always a sense of stress and twentieth-century blues beneath the smooth and soigné surface. Maybe there was a touch of that in Parkes’ work at the beginning of his latest phase: the clowns and dwarfs could seem threatening, not all the animals had their claws safely sheathed. But Parkes always seemed to be at least hankering after calm and tranquillity, and in his latest works he has achieved it. The calm is such that a longtime student of Zen and practitioner of Meditation ought to have reached it, or his studies would have counted for little.

The composer and music critic Constant Lambert once objected to Eric Satie’s monodrama Socrate that at times it seemed in danger of subsiding from the calm of a philosopher into the passivity of a dead object. There is no danger of that happening in Parkes’s art. He is too close in sentiment to Charles Baudelaire, who conjured up in one of his poems a vision of  “luxe, calme et volupte”. As long as the volupte remains a vital ingredient, Parkes cannot fail to excite as well as to enchant.

John Russell Taylor