Booksology Aaron Parazette got his first surfboard at age 11 and never looked back. For the next 12 years, the Ventura, California-born, now Houston-based artist passed countless hours in the ocean riding the waves. The son of an artist mother and architect father, Parazette was primed to pay attention to the power of craft and beauty. But it was the time spent atop a painted, streamlined surfboard that marked him the most in his adult life as a fine art painter. “Surfing, by far, was the most formative experience of my youth,” the artist says.
Edited by Nancy Zastudil, Aaron Parazette puts the spotlight on the artist’s more than 30-year career, tracing the impact of his crucial early inspirations on the evolution of his work. The book fleshes out the significance of Parazette’s exquisitely polished and quietly conceptual paintings, which have insistently pushed boundaries between abstraction and text art, at times on a monumental scale, for decades. Although the artist’s work emerges from and responds to larger currents in American art like abstract expressionism and the Los Angeles “Cool School,” this book establishes its unique voice and impact.
Those who know Parazette’s work well will be surprised to discover his earliest efforts here, including elaborate wooden constructions made during his MFA studies at Claremont Graduate University and painted steel pieces featuring curious corporate logos from the early 1990s. Michelle Grabner’s warm and incisive essay explains that Parazette’s critical beginnings gave way to an obsession with color, composition, and especially craft: she describes his pieces as having “a technical execution that approaches flawlessness.” But anyone who has seen Parazette’s graceful forms and punchy colors will know that his flawlessness isn’t sterile. Rather, his work invites our clear-eyed concentration, with the return of very real visual pleasure.
An essay by Alison de Lima Greene, the Curator for Modern and Contemporary Art at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, reveals Parazette’s deep ties to Space City. He and his partner and fellow artist Sharon Engelstein arrived in 1990 to participate in the Glassell School’s Core Program, and quickly integrated into Houston’s dynamic art ecosystem. As she tells this important history, de Lima Greene also discusses how Parazette’s “visually seductive and conceptually nimble” work has engaged with the legacy of Modernism over the years.
A totally unexpected treat comes in the form of a text on surf slang by Surfer magazine editor and Parazette’s former surf buddy Matt Warshaw. Words like “stoked” and “bitchin’” appear in Parazette’s tangy text paintings, and it’s delightful to gain background and context here. “We were all but porous, suspended in surf culture,” Warshaw writes, echoing the artist’s longtime immersion in the momentous feeling and motion of his early days on the waves.
The final portion of the book contains a thoughtful conversation between Parazette and fellow painter Dennis Hollingsworth in which the two talk about their influences, the ways that the art world and art making have changed over their careers, and the impact of Parazette’s nearly 30-year teaching career at the University of Houston. Throughout, we see an artist who has remained formally masterful and visually rigorous in paintings that have openly embraced his own history and steadily moved towards joy.
Here I should note that I carefully considered whether it would be a conflict of interest for me to write about the artist’s new book. Parazette was my professor in grad school, and during that uncertain, searching time he was an essential source of kindness, affirmation, and support. We’ve kept in touch in the more than ten years since, but my experiences with Parazette have always been based on his role as an encouraging and inquisitive mentor, always asking me about my work and motivations rather than the other way around. Of course, since moving to Houston in 2008 I had seen and marvelled at his precise but playful paintings around town, but without ever really having the chance to learn about them or about him as an artist on a deeper level. This book grants readers that vital insight, and gives us a close look at an artist who — unlike any other I’ve ever known — began his creative life on a surfboard.
Author’s note: Three of Parazette’s word paintings will appear in the next issue (Volume 35) of The Surfer’s Journal.
The monograph Aaron Parazette was edited by Nancy Zastudil and published by Skira earlier this year.
