MICHAEL PARKES

A new deluxe art book collecting the fine fantasy artwork of Michael Parkes from the publisher of Visions of Beauty by Kinuko Craft. Here strange beasts encounter mysterious winged and often nude women, good and evil fight it out, and in this weightless environment worlds are unmade and remade nearer to the heart’s desire in incredible fantasy paintings, drawings and elegant statues of beautiful women. Quite a lot of more recent work that was not collected in previous volumes, plus much of his best earlier work. Embossed gold detailing and finished with a velvety laminate, meticulously printed on premium 170-gram silk paper to ensure exceptional image clarity, rich color depth. "...the most comprehensive collection of my work ever published." -Michael Parkes. A massive 380 pages, large 10x13 size. Some nudity. When we first ordered this we understood it to include signed bookplates. However, the bookplates have been signed using an autopen. Autopen is a mechanical process used by U.S. Presidents & celebrities to "sign" multiple signatures. It is based on the person's real signature but it's a way to do many signatures without burdening the signer. On the other hand, we do NOT consider it to be a real signature. The upside: it's better than not being signed, and it looks great, done in a bold pen flourish that looks just like a signature. Win some, lose some! We've previously handled all of Michael Parkes' collections. His work is in a class and category by itself. This is indeed the largest collection ever of his work. For many years he did his prints using the classic and highly skilled method of stone lithography--that is, drawing each color on the stone and printing each piece with several impressions taken from the stone. It's an exacting process that results in lush, deeply colorful work that is unique among printing. After losing his favored stone lithographers in Switzerland, he switched to doing Giclee prints and producing more statues. This collects his best works in all these media on one enormous volume. - Bud From Michael's website: Michael Parkes is the world’s leading magical realist painter, sculptor, and stone lithographer. His decades of success as a fine artist stand out in the art world where few artists ever achieve success in both the primary and secondary markets. Michael Parkes’ works are collected by celebrities, prominent private collectors, and galleries around the world, and his body of work stands for all ages. His first one-man show was in Amsterdam back in 1977. Additional one-man exhibitions of Michael Parkes have taken place at Basel Art in Switzerland, Art Chicago, Art Fair NY, Frankfurt Bookfair, Amsterdam Art Fair, Tefaf Art and Antiques Fair Maastricht and numerous exhibitions in their galleries in Amsterdam and New York from 1977 onward. Though he studied graphic art and painting at the University of Kansas, his unique style evolved very much in isolation, after a period in which he gave up the practice of art altogether and went off to India in search of philosophical illumination: born in 1944, Michael Parkes was very much of the hippie generation. Earlier on, Michael Parkes had painted in the generally Abstract Expressionist style normal among his teachers, but after his pause for reflection he began to draw and paint in a meticulous style of detailed representation which would enable him to give full expression to his inner world of images.