Preoccupied by Erik Parker Painting Analysis

Artwork has always had such an impact on the way people think and on how a society function. It also can be used as a great source to express your mind on all kinds of topics that might have meaning in political, social, and other important issues. The painting that is going to be analyzed in this document is the painting “Preoccupied” by Erik Parker. This painting shows a wide array of colors and figures that contribute to the deep meaning that Parker wanted to portray and over all he does a great job expressing that deep meaning but fails to make some of these little characters understandable which takes away from his available success in the political world.

Before understanding the painting, we must understand the life of Erik parker even though most people just looking at this in a museum would have no real way to relate these images and ideas. Erik Parker was born in 1968 in Stuttgart, Germany. Even though he was born in Germany he didn’t speak German due to the fact that his dad was an American solider stationed in Stuttgart. He grew up in Texas and then moved to San Antonio in 1971 because his dad was a pilot in the Vietnam war. His job also involved picking up wounded soldiers from the battlefield which made him not the same person that Erik or his mother once knew. His life began to get harder when his parents got divorced due to the things his father brought home from the war. This made Parker hate the American ideologies of constant war and the statis quo.  

The painting is a little larger than poster size and was made that way to make the little sketches inside visible enough to leave room for personal interpretation. Its hard to say that words can describe such a complicated piece of artwork although I think that is one of the goals of this painting. It starts off with an ocean that has many different blue waves that surrounds the entire main land mass of the United States of America. The border around the whole United States is made of large, intricate bones. The setup of the land mass is divided into horizontal rows that never bend and are all different widths. The one row that stands out the most is the middle row which is about six times larger than the rest and just has the words “Preoccupied”. Going into the smaller rows there are countless different shapes and patters such as tanks, aliens, fists, church like structures, blobs, stars, pistols, fingers and much more. What may or may not be important is the various colors that are in the land mass and the bubbly font they are all in. Going back to the start of the descriptions, the bones surrounding the United States most likely mean the way people of other cultures have been left out and segregated from the ideal American society. Even the placement of these lines and the amount of them can describe or give a location to the ideas that Parker is trying to portray. To describe this, there are lines over Detroit and all of them have gun symbols and alien looking creatures to display gangs and skinheads. The area in the middle of the United States labeled “Preoccupied” is very hard to interpret. Due to the amount of Native American symbols around this word it could have something to do with the scandals involving the natives or just identify the modern territories which they hold. Or this could be something entirely different in the fact that the Midwest in his opinion isn’t really doing much besides agriculture and not focused on important political issues. It is hard to picture what this portion means which goes into my point that people that people who don’t know the backstory of the painting will have no idea what they are looking at in that section or even more. The portion of the painting that I believe was supposed to have the most meaning would have to be the little figures inside of the rows. The truth is that just like the “preoccupied” section there can be all kinds of interpretation with each of his characters. There are even some figures not mentioned in this paper that don’t fit with the surroundings and are even completely random to the area in which they are located. Overall, there is a trend with some of the figures such as the aliens resemble skin heads, the guns represent gangs, the tank could represent military bases or just war, the church represents the southern areas of high Christian populations, little patterns could represent the absence of problems, and the bullets could mean high death areas. There are other random ones such as a bong that is placed over the northwest United States to represent either drug abuse of recreational use of marijuana. With saying all this only Erik Parker knows all the true meanings behind this complicated and intricate art piece.  

This paintings effectiveness is truly up to the person viewing it. If you went through what Parker went through you might understand the way in which he painted this. If not, then it may just look like an ordinary painting that has a lot of cool doodles. I don’t necessarily think that the painting that effective just due to the way that he was trying to make his opinions visible. Maybe if the cartoons were bigger or he put more emphasis on just a few major issues with America he could have done better. Even making a political cartoon would have been a great option because what he was trying to achieve is exactually what political cartoons are made for. Plus, the doodles involved in a political cartoon would be a great fit for Parker’s art style. Based on the article about the painting he only presented it to people that made art just like him and people of historian profession. This is something that he could have optimized to send his message and reach a better outcome. 

Overall, the “Preoccupied” painting was a major display of what can be created using your feelings and past experiences to influence and benefit other people. We saw how Erik Parker had many family struggles that led him to live a lifestyle of helping others understand what they didn’t necessarily know about pressing political topics. Later Parkers painting was put into the Aldrich contemporary art museum where people from all over could view. In all, the paining “Preoccupied” portrayed a great array of colors and hidden symbols that are in many ways helpful to the society and rather an effective piece of artwork, but with the figures being so small it would be hard for somebody to look at them and know the hidden political meanings behind them. Erik Parker really paved a new way of looking at art by putting his heart, soul and mind into his paintings.