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From the Journal of the Print World, Spring 2004
In all of her recent work, Margaret Adams Parker has demonstrated an extraordinary sensitivity to the people who populate the world she inhabits. While many artists have a facility for limning incisive psychological portrayals of people they know, people they might like to know, people who pay them to do so, or people whose celebrity status renders them inherently and broadly interesting, Parker’s sweep is a much broader one. She seems to be interested in just about everyone she runs across.
From Arabs and Israelis in Jerusalem to American teenagers hanging out on the beach, she has captured the essence of hundreds of ordinary people in drawings, woodblock prints and sculptures. When we look at her works, which often appear deceptively simple in composition, we feel as if we are privy to how her subjects feel, what their values are, what makes them tick or, at a minimum, what their life is like at a particular instant in time. Some of her works feel so intimate we are tempted to turn away from them, fearful of intruding on a private moment.
The woodblock prints that comprise Parker’s upcoming show at the Washington Printmakers Gallery, entitled "WOMEN," are no exception. In them, we encounter women of all types, some rather exotic to our eyes, others the very epitome of ordinariness. None of them are engaged in particularly interesting or overtly telling activities nor are they surrounded by elaborate props or backdrops that would help tell the story of their lives. Instead, we are forced by the very simplicity and spareness of the prints to focus on the figures themselves and listen to the stories they have to tell.
If we listen closely, we find these stories to be quite amazing in their familiarity. Parker manages to portray the most universal feelings and emotions through depicting people who are utterly individual, and she does it almost entirely through body type, posture, and facial features. Clothing is generally rather generic, shoes are generally basic or nonexistent, and backgrounds are typically ambiguous.
But these women, who are defined by Parker’s signature bold, black strokes and suggestive bits of modeling, demonstrate their individuality and their  universality alike through their musculature, their astonishingly expressive hands and feet, and through faces etched with lines and wrinkles that speak variously and sometimes simultaneously of grieving and rejoicing, tenderness and poignancy, strength and vulnerability.
They also speak importantly about beauty, but not about the glamorous, standardized concepts we normally conjure up when the subject of female beauty arises. Instead, these images demonstrate the beauty that resides in strength and in love, in hard work and in dignity in the face of difficulty; they also bear witness to the beauty inherent in the myriad ordinary moments that make up a woman’s life.
We see women primping, working, and mothering. We see girls growing up and women growing old. We see the gamut of ages and body types, and a diverse sampling of ethnic backgrounds. And we realize that each one is, in her own quiet way, really quite beautiful.
After many years of working in oils, Parker has all but given up that medium in favor of the woodblock print. She likes the history of the woodblock medium and its physicality, and she likes the feeling of being immersed more directly in her work than she was when standing a brush-length away from her canvases. But most of all, she appreciates the expressive power of the medium which allows her to make the serious yet simple and declarative statements she now feels compelled to make about the human condition.
Parker is a skilled enough artist to exploit the medium’s possibilities for all they’re worth. Her contour lines are heavy and black, and the spaces they define are unencumbered by extraneous detail; colors, when used, are broadly applied, tame and unobtrusive. Yet with a deft economy of stroke, she manages to convey a convincing illusion of texture, earthiness and dimensionality that ground her works in a kind of physical reality that keeps them from entering the realm of pure metaphor, parable or fable. And she  manages, in some magically inexplicable way, to imbue her subjects’ faces with a soulful sort of character that belies their relative simplicity of appearance.
Parker often creates her prints in series. Besides this group of prints about women, she has also recently created and shown a series inspired by the city and people of Jerusalem and another that interprets and illustrates scenes from the book of Ruth. The latter were conceived for and have been published in an annotated translation of the biblical text by Ellen Davis entitled, Ruth: Who Are You, My Daughter? Reading Ruth Through Image and Text, published by Westminster John Knox Press.
Judy Pomeranz is an art critic based in Arlington, Virginia.
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