Sean Bw Parker is willing to accept commissions

The Art of Catharsis and The Art of Synthesis


While I’m happy to write about other people’s creative work, writing about my own feels somehow disingenuous, whether that’s about painting or music. It’s so much more interesting when the viewer gives you their own interpretation. That said, the cultural milieu influences my portraits, the paint itself influences my abstracts, and it’s all at its best when I bring them together successfully (though success is a famously subjective term in art). I call this the Art of Synthesis. The subject of my paintings tends to be a ‘jump-off point’, from which I try to let the process, rather than any attempted verisimilitude to the subject, take over.

The word Catharsis was originally a physical or medical term for purging the body. Aristotle applied it to drama in his Poetics, describing the purging of pity and fear from the audience, leading to emotional relief and renewal. I see many of my portraits of figures said to

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