Phillip Prescott Parham
Yale University School of Art, MFA
Owner/Artist
My work is a cinematic autobiography from the struggles of my life. For me, life’s understanding is derived from the personal struggles that I have lived and from the encounters that I have had from meditating on the sacred writings of antiquity. These revelations are not only from my mind, but from my spirit, thus transcend time and space, releasing the power for my change. I offer these visions to the observer, as they have been the milestones of my life. Miracles still happen, because they happened in me. I attempt to paint their effect and this is my Sacred Revivalism.
The hope of my work is to reflect a reality that I have personally walked through and offer as help to your heart and soul. My paintings open the door to see the hope that is so often swept under the rug of irrelevancy and sentimentality. These reflections reveal secrets of life that are opened to those who seek and those who listen. Those soft breezes of revelation that come in the night when there is no moon and we call out and dream for an answer. Answers always come when I have sought for understanding of life’s unfathomable questions. The answers for me have always been derived from the sacred. Often the sacred answers were those I had not yet conceived and always accompanied the breezes of peace, change and hope. My paintings are the signposts of the eternal and immutable from where destiny originates.
After decades of the agonies and ecstasies of the financial world, my spirit remained parched by the unfulfillment of my life’s dream to paint.
As I commuted on the Southern Pacific train each morning at 4 am into the financial district in San Francisco, the images just stacked up in my heart to paint, “someday when”.
“Someday When” came in May of 2007. It was as if I had awakened an artesian well as I started to paint again after 40 years in the desert. These images of antiquity had been often painted but the artist doesn’t often try painting its personal effect upon him.
I offer these paintings as a window into my life to invite you to see each captured effect of each epic moment. I attempt to document its transformation by sacred enlightenment and transport the viewer to the invisible yet palpable spiritual solution.
Phillip Prescott Parham
Yale University School of Art, MFA