Tas Weekend
Andrew Harper
page 16 July 22-23, 2023

Ian Parry continues on his voyage, and as ever, he’s always the same and he’s always different. This selection of images of sky and sea have all the formal hallmarks he’s established for himself in his more abstracted works, yet are working in another direction – a more recognisably expressionistic set of visions. Parry has captured beautiful visions of edgelands of day and night, the stretched-out moments where the sun rolls down and the moon seeps light over the ocean.

These are beautiful works that have a pleasing ambience, but there’s something else here as well. Parry is still Parry and he paints the way he always has, but with these new works, I feel we get further insight into how he twists and interrogates the landscape to make an image.

I think his style is recognisable no matter what he does, and what he does is always informed by the ocean and the sky, but over years of painting the work has shifted around. It’s why I keep returning to his exhibitions with interest – I know that I’m going to get art that I enjoy from this artist, but I also know he’s going to do something I wasn’t expecting in some way.

Parry is investigating something, and long may he continue seeking out whatever it is.
 
New Works Ian Parry
Colville Gallery
11-31 July - Art Guide 2023

Ian Parry’s art is an incisive complication of the term ‘abstract’. While the Tasmanian artist has described his approach as such – clearly seen through his use of amorphous shapes, swelling patterns and juxtaposition of colour – Parry’s paintings are foremost an interpretation of environment. The artist, who is a descendant of seafarers, renders impressions of the ocean and sky; the horizon is often integral.
“These paintings continue to look at water and sky, the intangible and shifting elements,” says Parry of his latest exhibition at Colville Gallery. “They are painted in the southernmost region of Tasmania, which is more an event than a landscape – a silent movie free of the chattering of humanity.”
Parry sees his work in a tradition of “silent paintings”, citing the influence of Australian artists Clarice Beckett and David Davies, as well as French artist Jean-Francoise Millet and German artist Caspar David Friedrich. “I grew up in [Clarice] Beckett country,” he says, referring to the bayside area of Victoria, “and as a very young painter, I lived through her eyes.” He also uses the term “slow painting” to describe the delicate and mediative unfolding of his oil paintings.
Over his long career, Parry’s work has been procured by several major Australian public collections, as well as the prestigious Phillips Collection in Washington, DC. His art can be summarised as a combination of imagination, sensibility and memory, inspired by travels around his region, bringing back nature’s aesthetic cues to his studio shed in the rural town of Gardners Bay – where a process of abstraction takes place.
“I do not work en plein air – more by the absorption method; these roamings supply my visual diet with at least a tonal naturalism.”
– Barnaby Smith
 
Paintings From The Hill or What You See Is What You Get
Ian Parry
Colville Gallery
Review by Andrew Harper

It’s long established that Ian Parry is something of a restless investigator of his own art: if there’s a distinct strategy that always appears in his work it is that he keeps shifting and sifting through his own methods and tactics, interrogating them, re-thinking and re-doing. I’ve long wondered how long he might do this for, but it seems he will never arrive at a destination and that his journey is his method – and what a good thing that is. This show in particular is rife with transition and shift, as the artist demonstrates a number of modes and potentials for his art. This would be more than enough, but in amongst this show is a massive diptych, Untitled Until Now, which coalesces Parry’s abstract ideas into a bright, enveloping work that has an extraordinary magnetism.
 
Another World
Ian Parry
Andrew Harper
Visual Arts The Mercury February 25-26 2016 p.21

Ian Parry is confident, hard-working and in charge of what he’s doing. This doesn’t indicate he has a shtick he endlessly churns out, nor that his painting isn’t heading somewhere.
From his last show A Part of the World, to this exhibition, there’s been a shift in what Parry is investigating: his sense that his somewhere has not changed – but it may have expanded.
It seems Parry iis fascinated by maps: the title of one of the works in this series, Mercator, refers both to a type of map and the historical figure who made it. This was clear from his last show, but something else has since developed. Parry seems to be more mobile, shifting his eye from location to location, capturing features and exploring geographic landmarks.
There’s a hint of restlessness, perhaps, as he traces lines across seas tinged into dark reds, tracing journeys made by Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh around the D’Entrecasteaux Channel. But Parry is not simply in Tasmania – he is also in Scotland. Time seems to be gnawing at his work and he adds it in, making it part of the tools with which he navigates life, mapping it, recording the significant locations.
 
Opening Notes Ian Parry 29 Jan 2016

Welcome to the new body of works by Ian Parry A Part of the World.
Parry is an artist who trained, taught and exhibited in Melbourne before moving to this part of the world some 15 years ago.
When I look at these paintings it brings to mind the challenging works of Gerhard Richter, contemporary German expressionist, who similar to Picasso and Jean Arp, follows in undermining the concept of the artist’s obligation to maintain a singular cohesive style.
Here Parry takes landscape, or more specifically seascape, ‘and guts it’. What does it mean ? Marine charts and navigational reading becomes 3D. He takes colour and form, identifies it, grabs it, the colours intensified. The plotted line of the boat, a dramatic slash of movement.
He further pushes these relationships into abstracted patterns of structure, colour harmonies and where one form is a response to another.
Result – hum dingers.
Again to quote Richter and his thoughts.
“No one painting is meant to be more beautiful than, or even different from any other. Noor is it meant like any other, each painted individually and by itself, not all together and all of a piece.”
Here, there is no pretence, no plagiarism . Each work is created individually, stands by itself, but each forms a response to another.
Here what you see is a huge honesty, they are highly articulate, powerful and original works.
Trudi Young. Director.
 
With flying colours

The fields of colourful shapes that shift and blur together in this series by Ian Parry hover like apparitions in a borderland between the freedom of the abstract and the disciplines of landscape painting. It is as if Parry has reached a point where he doesn't need to paint any particular thing: he simply needs to paint. Parry is at a later stage of his career and this is art by someone who is still deeply engaged with his own investigation and process as a painter, whose artistic output has surprising vigour and energy.
The large paintings are filled with hard work, layers of colour and tactile vibrancy. All the compositions are riots of contrasting hues and forms, butting up against each other in a manner that faintly echoes maps and surveys.
Each is filled with carefully layered colour, glazed and then scraped back with apparent physical force - Parry appears to have really worked into the paint at certain points - and the edges of each patch of colour seem to pulse and even glow.
They may not show anything in particular but they still feel as if Parry is outside, breathing in the sea air and using his catalogue of experience to create something that feels like the landscape rather than just showing it.
He invokes symbolic ideas, though -each of the artworks contains forms that hint at past phases of his work, that reach back to shapes and lines that may have been more recognisably derived from places or maps marked with lines that describe a journey or a path but that he has worked into a new alignment. It could be a landscape of the mind.
Each work has a vibrant beauty that makes a riot of disparate colour and form come together in a way that seems logical and natural The cohesion Parry achieves is a testament to the technical understanding of an experienced artist,but what really comes to the fore is the strong character of the work.
Here is as good an example as you'll find of an artist pushing himself into truly interrogating his own art practice.
Parry knows what He wants and it is by the action of his hand, guided by a studied intellect and a bold eye, he realises his vision.

Andrew Harper, Tas Weekend Feb 13th- 14 th 2016