I lost the use of both thumbs and my hands were in splints for several months.

I knew that my ability to paint was not just in my hands, nor was I the first artist to face this limitation. Renoir suffered from rheumatoid arthritis and his brush had to be strapped to his hand. Chuck Close became a quadriplegic but regained use of his arms. He, too, strapped his brush to his hand and paints, sometimes guiding the right hand with his left.

The last time I was a resident at A.I.R Vallauris in 2008, I left a box of materials. This time I decide not to take any materials with me and to just make use of what is in the box and whatever I find in the street. I have two notions about how to use my time. One, is to experiment, respond to the moment and not plan everything out. The other is to look at Goya's paintings and see if there is a way to distill their essence into something abstract. I didn't expect to do these two things together. When I open the box, I have plenty of paint, some brushes, and several pieces of 300 lb Fabriano watercolor paper. But what really excites me, is the box itself. It sat in a dry shed for eight years. The cardboard is soft and no longer has much structural strength. One side is white. I tear off one of the flaps and start painting.

Little do I remember of the astronomy lecture I attended twenty some years ago on a warm summer night in an observatory on what may be the last densely wooded tract of land in Cambridge. What I do remember is that the lecture put me in a kind of swoon. For the first time in my life, science and poetry became one. Somehow a talk on chaos theory and its relation to the order of the universe – randomness as the predictable and necessary precursor to design – had the heft and elegance and perspicacity of a poem you want to memorize or a painting you don’t want to leave. 

Leslie Parke’s paintings live at the same intersection where patterns court chaos, abstraction approaches the figurative and stasis hovers on the cusp of implosion. Her paintings are charged by contradictions: impersonal grids softened by sunlight; watery washes with metallic spikes; a cathedral of squiggles above a perfectly triangular black hole; the aurora borealis in a zip lock bag.