​

Preface

 

Since I first saw the room-sized installation ironically titled “Drift” in the Denver gallery named St. Charles on the Wazee, the visual art of Charles Parson has affected my perspective on the world I was born into.

         I feel differently about time and distance because I have been witness to almost all of his career as an artist in the American West. And I know that I experience the landscape differently because of what his sculptures and wall constructions say about the spaces a person might occupy and those to which we have no practicable access.

         All of that is big — as huge as the wide, overwhelming, and dangerous region it occupies, that it has in so many quiet and insinuative ways grown out of.

         Much has been written about the scale of Parson’s sculptural work, about its planar characteristics, its whiteness, his “industrial” materials. But few commentators have spoken to the delicacy and intimacy of his drawing — not only his draftsmanship, but the trace of the heartfelt sound that a pencil must make in his hand.

         This book is an attempt to focus on that intimacy, sometimes sad and often joyful, each time that thin paper anchors the work of an artist critics have described in more monumental ways.

         It has always been the drawings in the work of Charles Parson that have moved me most.