Ariel Reynolds Parkinson (1926 - 2017)
For every chapter of Bay Area bohemianism there was also Ariel, carving her own channels between what she called “Beat then Hip, then Rock, Love, the Natural World.” At first, in the late 1940s, she found herself among the poets and playwrights of the so-called Berkeley Bunch. Younger than many and one of few women, she maintained a sharp and sometimes ironic distance from their oblivious masculinity, even if she also enjoyed their “pacifist, anarcho-syndicalist, syncretist, pan-cultural gatherings.” Then she studied at the California School of Fine Arts, painting under Hassel Smith when “Dream was in, and Cosmos.” After that, the dawn of the hippie movement, walking to the Human Be-In with her young friend Allen Ginsberg and holding a sign that read “I Represent the Lower Animals.”
Sensitive as she was to new tendencies and social change, Ariel also maintained old-world decorum and an archaic, arch-romantic sensibility. San Francisco critic Alfred Frankenstein compared her to William Blake, as if her work belonged to a previous century. Her style skews surreal and whimsical, with a grotesque undercurrent drawn from the darker elements of Art Nouveau. It is seductive but also repellent, producing what she called “the posture of cruel joy”—like the Worm Queen from her friend Helen Adam’s San Francisco’s Burning: A Ballad Opera:
My crown is crusted with carrion flies
And my head is bald and wet,
But the loveliest woman of living flesh
With you will quite forget.
Ariel’s creative anchor was always nature. Specifically, “the California of John Muir, Ishi, and Kroeber.” When stuck in the city, she could turn to what Gary Snyder called the inner wilderness, an interior plain of marshes and tidepools overgrown with “Ur-vegetation.” The work that emerged from this wilderness allowed Ariel to found a movement of one: bio-classicism. And when one curator dismissed her painting as a puddle of swamp water, the artist was undisturbed. She drew harsh caricatures of industrial barons and other enemies of the planet. More becoming drawings graced protest banners and guidance on a new municipal project known as recycling. Ariel became a thorn in the side of the Solid Waste Management board. “Garbage is simply resources out of place, and I was its Joan of Arc.” Ultimately, she left the project of recycling behind and made convincing arguments for doing away with packaging entirely.
Whether fearsome, dainty, erotic, or in dissent, the artworks of Ariel are guided by the senses. Paintings and drawings emerged from what she called “various admixtures and applications of the pleasure principle.” Nature was something to safeguard in part because it was interesting to see, feel, smell, and taste. Watching her watercolor spread is satisfying; her human figures are voluptuous. The writers and artists in her company—Robert Duncan, Anaïs Nin, Jack Spicer, Jess, Kenneth Rexroth, Norman O. Brown—were not so different. They exalted feelings, even ugly ones, for how much they could be felt. Neither Ariel nor the Worm Queen play favorites in this realm. They provoke goosebumps as much as induce repose. In the inner wilderness, sensations are vital, but they won’t always make you feel better.
- Zully Adler
Ariel's career spans over fifty years, during which time she fluidly moved between painting, drawing, and scenography for various theatre companies nationwide. Living and working in Berkeley, California, for the entirety of her career, she remained sequestered from the burgeoning San Francisco Renaissance of the 1950s & 1960s, instead opting to join the poets and writers headquartered at the University of California, Berkeley. At the center, her husband, Thomas Parkinson. During her career, Ariel produced a tremendous amount of artwork, wearable objects, sculptures, and mechanical drawings for theatre productions. We are thrilled to shepherd Ariel's legacy as a majorly influential figure of one of the most significant cultural movements of the 20th Century in the United States back into the contemporary fold.
Ariel’s is an art of powerful forms articulated by equally powerful icons. Some of her paintings are hallucinogenic pilgrimages; others, epics of an idea. Vibrant and tactile though her colors and textures are, the impact of Ariel’s paintings does not depend on them. Her work is sustained primarily through composition and iconography. Ariel’s mastery of them suggests that hers may be important art.
Ariel held a dual foci, painting and stage design, and their relationship helped develop her powerful and sophisticated style. To enrich her painting, she employed techniques standard to scenography, such as using three hues to produce one projecting color. She applied her compositional proficiency to the stage picture, and the complexity of that picture- in three dimensions, not two- refined and heightened her sense of structure and her use of significant detail. Dance and theatre required her to master composition, which includes moving elements. The subjects and the substance of dance, drama, and music enriched her iconography.
"I am a theatrical designer who is a painter, and a painter who is a theatrical designer. The combination of painter and scenographer is rare. It is the combination practiced in my long career which I use now to describe the conditions of life of the place where I have lived - the western littoral of the Pacific between the forest and the sea.”
Working for and with choreographers, directors, and photographers, she established a visual system in which the controlling compositional idea was continually remade. The personas she devised were so strong and clear that, however positioned in relation to one another at any given moment, the total image is coherent and successful. Ariel’s images are so various they seem, sometimes, to be drawn from the totality of all possible worlds.
I’ve tried to follow Yeats’ dictum, ‘Hammer your thoughts into unity.’ I have worked at putting the world together. The imperative is not just technical but also conceptual. It has to do with the visual nature of the world and its substantive nature- the laws or lines of force which govern it. The unity is also eschatological and ethical. That is why I am sometimes so ‘stubborn.’ Everything is connected to everything else. If you move, or want to move, the left eye half an inch to the right, you skew the universe.
Ariel’s definition of meaning is deliberately primitive: “Everything I do in my studio has to point beyond itself. For me, that is ‘meaning’ - or the illusion of meaning."
In a 1988 description of her work, Ariel (with characteristically dry transcendentalism) lists Abstract Expressionism as second only to the landscape of California as a source of her style and art. Nevertheless, she was interested more in the poets, less in the painters of the California of the late 1940s and the 1950s. Her closest friends and collaborators were the poets who would become influential members of the so-called "Berkeley Bunch": Robert Duncan, Kenneth Rexroth, Jack Spicer, Richard Moore, William Everson, and Thomas Parkinson, whom she married in 1948. Later, the literary circle included, most notably, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, Phillip Whalen, and Alan Ginsberg. Ariel would remain one of the few women and visual artists associated with the group of poets and writers.
Ariel would credit the conceptual grounds for her most significant body of work, her Inner Wilderness Series, to her friend, Gary Snyder.
The world is our consciousness, and it surrounds us…
The depths of the mind, the unconscious, are our inner
Wilderness areas, and that is where a bobcat is right now.