ABOUT ROBERT ANDREW PARKER

Parker was born May 14, 1927 in Norfolk, Virginia to William and Harriet (Cowdin) Parker. William Parker was a dentist with the U.S. Public Health Service. Harriet Parker was an amateur watercolorist who ensured her son had access to art supplies. Jazz music was a big part of Parker’s childhood thanks to his father's extensive record collection and appreciation for jazz. Before he was ten years old, Parker was diagnosed with tuberculosis. William Parker requested a transfer to Fort Stanton, New Mexico where there was a well-staffed, federal clinic and sanitarium to care for patients with TB. The dry climate, fresh air, well-ventilated rooms and the great outdoors in New Mexico mountain country were believed to be beneficial for TB patients at the time.

For two years, Robert Andrew Parker lived outside in bed on a screened-in porch overlooking the hills. Parker was alone most of the day, so he read and drew a lot. Robert Andrew Parker reflects, “I always felt that in some way, with all that free time for reading and drawing, the illness turned out to be a blessing. It was painless. All you had to do was stay down, rest and be quiet. Eventually, I got well. ”

Those countless hours of reading in bed-ridden solitude, Robert Andrew Parker believes, helped form his love for literature that years later heightened his artistic sensitivity as he became a much sought-after illustrator for books by such literary heavyweights as W.H. Auden, William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov, Stendahl and Marianne Moore.

Robert Andrew Parker graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1952 after serving in the Army in the 1940s. He moved to New York after he spent a summer at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture studying under Jack Levine. Parker continued to develop his printmaking skills at Atelier 17, an historically important printmaking studio founded by the renowned English painter and printmaker, Stanley William Hayter. Robert Andrew Parker was also chosen in 1952 as the youngest artist to show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the — Exhibition of American Watercolors, Drawings and Prints — the exhibition featured Stuart Davis, John Marin, Robert Andrew Parker and Jackson Pollock. 

Primarily known for his painting and prints of figures, landscapes and animals, Robert Andrew Parker also produced set designs for operas and films. Early in his career, Parker was hired to travel to France and paint reproductions of Van Gogh's paintings which were used as backdrop props in Lust for Life — the 1956 MGM Technicolor classic film directed by Vincente Minnelli about artist Vincent Van Gogh. Kirk Douglas won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Motion Picture Drama and Anthony Quinn won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. 

Parker has produced countless bound and portfolio-style books: alphabets, journals of dreams and travels, portraits of women writers, all collected in folios of various shapes, sizes, and mediums.  Robert Andrew Parker has illustrated numerous literary classics by authors from Franz Kafka to Joseph Heller; and for the United States Air Force in Rwanda and Panama; album covers for Columbia Records; for The New Yorker, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, Playboy and Time magazines; and one hundred (100) children’s books receiving the Randolph Caldecott Medal and the Robert F. Siebert Informational Book Medal. 

Robert Andrew Parker is a drummer in addition to visual artist. His band — Jive by Five — plays a hard-swinging recreation of the great jump band style of the 1940s that moved out of Harlem and Chicago’s south side to become part of mainstream jazz — the music of Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk and more. According to James Lincoln Collier, author of Louis Armstrong: An American Genius; Duke Ellington; Jazz: The American Theme Song and Benny Goodman and the Swing Era — all published by Oxford University Press, “They're one of the most exciting bands I've heard.”

Art and jazz have been two long-running passions in the life of Robert Andrew Parker. He received a Schneider Family Book Award — an award given by the American Library Association for excellence in portraying the disability experience in literature for youth —for The Piano Starts Here: Young Art Tatum, which Robert Andrew Parker wrote and illustrated in 2008. Art Tatum was nearly blind, but his passion for the piano and sound memory drove him to become a virtuoso who was revered by both classical and jazz pianists. 

Robert Andrew Parker says in The Piano Starts Here: Young Art Tatum, “In 1946 (while in the Army’s B-29 bomber training program) I went to 52nd Street in New York City, where most of the jazz greats played — and I heard Lester Young, Ben Webster, Roy Eldridge, Beryl Booker, and Art Tatum. The place was jammed, and Tatum was amazing.”