Parkes, a famed restorer of paintings since 1971, currently heads the established Simon Parkes Art Conservation Co. in Manhattan, splitting his time living between New York City, East Hampton, and Swan's Island, Maine. Most recently, a group of his newest paintings was exhibited at W.M. Brady & Co. in Manhattan in 2016.
In Gardiner’s Bay, Early July, East Hampton, Parkes captures a quiet, expansive moment viewed from across the bay, offering a contemplative perspective on the coastal landscape. The composition is elegantly balanced, with the horizon line dividing the canvas nearly in half, creating a calm equilibrium between sky and water. The painting reflects Parkes’s signature plein air approach—direct, observational, and attuned to the subtle shifts of light and atmosphere that define a specific time and place.
Across the bay, a delicate line of trees stretches laterally, separating the thinly painted, almost translucent water from the broad blue sky above. The water itself is rendered with a washy lightness, suggesting both stillness and depth, while several tiny sailboats dot the bay, distant and sparse, like quiet punctuation marks in the open waterscape. This sense of scale, with the boats almost lost in the vastness, reinforces a mood of solitude and spatial expanse.
The sky, occupying the upper half of the canvas, is filled with summer clouds that speak to the variability and softness of early July weather. Near the horizon, the clouds are full and fluffy while higher up in the composition they become wispy and feathered, dissolving into the light-filled blue. These shifting cloud forms are rendered with Parkes’s characteristic sensitivity to texture and light, giving the sky a dynamic, living quality.
Through his restrained palette and measured brushwork, Parkes creates not just a depiction of Gardiner’s Bay but a reflection on the feeling of being there, still, observant, and immersed in the quiet presence of the landscape.
Artist to W.M. Brady & Co., Inc., 1998
Greenwich Gallery of American Art, acquired from the above
Private Collection, CT, to present