“I decided the school should have it because I could donate it, and they could use the extra poster for fundraising,” Naval Artist Wilma Parker told Prime about the latest addition to the Museum at Classical Commons – formerly Classical High School - in Springfield, MA.
The poster – a copy of a commissioned painting “Homecoming, NAS Alameda” that Parker painstakingly researched and crafted to commemorate the closing of Alameda Naval Base in California in 1997 – was presented to the Commons on Jan. 10. Like so many other events during the coronavirus pandemic, the ceremony occurred virtually, with Parker appearing from her San Francisco home via the internet.
“I was glad it was framed, because [the poster] was quite large,” the 1959 graduate of the former high school remarked, adding. “The actual painting [which now hangs at NAS LeMoore in California] is 42 inches by 8 feet long, in two panels.”
The Classical donation isn’t the first time this Springfield native and her marine artwork have made their mark on the city. In 1992, the Springfield Museums hosted an exhibit of Parker’s paintings for the Navy, some which were done at the submarine base in Groton, CT.
“The Museum, at the time, wasn’t going to give me a show because I was out in San Francisco,” and they thought people wouldn’t come, Parker shared. “I called Groton and they said they would ‘drive a sub up the Connecticut’ to make sure there were people at my show.
“They didn’t come up in a sub, but in two buses, and it was fabulous to have that many sailors at my opening,” she said.
A self-proclaimed “Modernist,” Parker’s Naval artwork has also been exhibited nationally at the Submarine Force Museum in Groton, CT, the Lyman Allyn Art Museum in New London, CT, the National Museum of Naval Aviation in Pensacola, FL the Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C. and in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum’s Looking at Earth.
Beyond the Navy work, Parker is also a prolific marine, portrait and landscape artist, who has shown worldwide, including her Mulberry Street House paintings at the Springfield Museum in 1986 and at the Classical Commons museum in 2012. Her most recent exhibit locally was at the annual juried art show in Agawam in 2019.
Her ties to her home city have always remained close, as Parker’s brother John still lives in the family home – formerly owned by the Blake family – that her parents bought on Union Street in the Ridgewood Historic District of Springfield in 1951. “My father was an architect for Friendly’s.” Parker said. “The cupola on the roof, that was his design.”
But how does a girl from Springfield become the artist chosen to capture the history of a West Coast Naval base on canvas? By way of the Rhode Island School of Design, Chicago, and “a series of major mistakes,” the confirmed “flower child” explained candidly when Prime chatted with her from her San Francisco studio in late January.
Parker credited her two art teachers at Classical High School – Miss Mackenzie and Mrs Laramie – with fostering her talent and interest in art as a career.
“Miss Mackenzie was very crucial to me,” Parker shared. “I was a freshman…she introduced us to all the things happening in European art – Matisse and Picasso,” she said. “Mrs. Laramie, she thought art should be serviceable; we made signs that said ‘Principal’s Office’ and ‘Parking Lot’ and we went around and hung up those signs.”
When she graduated in 1959, she chose to attend the Rhode Island School of Design, though she said her “mother held out for Skidmore [College].” After graduation, she returned to Springfield and spent a few years working as an engraver for R & R Engraving. During that time, she worked with a woman who had earned her master’s degree in art at the Chicago Institute of Design.
That school became her next stop on the road to the West Coast.
“After I graduated [from the Institute in 1966] I taught public school, and with a couple of teachers, drove out
to [California],” Parker said. “In those years if you were alive and could crawl you had to be in San Francisco.”
Her two companions quickly returned to Chicago and their jobs, but Parker stayed. “I was able to find a huge studio – it was a rebuilt horse barn in a bad neighborhood south of Market Street.”
She began supporting herself with some substitute teaching and a few early commission pieces, met and married her husband and has “been in that studio 47 years,” she admitted. “And all the time, or at least half the time, I was hoping and scheming to get to New York City and a 2,000 square foot studio with lots of room.”
Searching for lucrative subjects to paint in her adopted San Francisco hometown, Parker said she started “going down to the docks” to try her hand at painting the ships in the harbor. “Someone said ‘paint sailboats,’” Parker recalled, and she began a career as a marine artist, something she continues to this day. She also secured a membership to the famed Salmagundi Art Club of Greenwich Village, N.Y. Through that club she connected with the Coast Guard and began doing work for that military branch.
However, it was a former Classical High School classmate, Terry Regina, whom Parker credits with starting her on the path to painting for the Navy.
“She got me interested in doing something when the Navy was
going to name its newest [Los Angeles Class] submarine the Springfield,” Parker said. She contacted the Navy about painting the submarine, which launched from the Groton, CT. sub base in 1992. That commission was titled “Launch of the Springfield.”
It was the first of some 20 works she would do for the Navy, according to her website. Parker explained the Navy is very traditional, and likes to have things done in the traditional way; most of those works are oil on canvas, as is the one reproduced in the poster that now hangs in the Classical Commons museum.
In an article about her work on “Homecoming”– which she herself calls a “seminal piece” – published in the spring 2020 edition of The American
Society of Marine Artists, Fred Turner, associate professor, Department of Communication and Art and Art History, Stanford University said this about her work: “For Parker though, painting the Navy means much more than the dynamic energy of its machines. It means painting the men and women who work on the ships, the children and families of the sailors, and above all, the forces of nature with which they contend.”
Parker said it was another Navy-related work that ultimately led to the commission to paint “Homecoming,” commemorating the closing of the base at Alameda. It was a “very nice portrait” she had done of the wife of Base Commanding Officer, Cpt. James Dodge, displayed at his wife’s retirement from the Navy, that caught the commander’s eye.
“He was a great inspiration to me,” Parker said of Dodge. “It took me at least two years [to paint] and I had to go down to their museum to get a lot of information about the planes, and compile a lot of information before I could start.
“I [also] had to go down to the air station to plan the composition,” she further explained. “In painting you can repaint a face, but your biggest job is to establish the composition.”
That was where Dodge impressed upon her the importance of getting everything right, Parker recalled.
“He said, ‘You can’t fail. There will be all these retired [air]men who will not see their plane,’” Parker shared. “He installed confidence in me that I could do the job. And thank God I did the job well enough that I was rewarded with a trip aboard the [USS]Constellation.”
That trip she said, included she and her husband being flown out to sea for a tour of the ship –“that was before all the restrictions of today,” she said – and later catapulted off for the return flight home, “going from zero to 300 miles per hour in about 30 seconds,” she joked. The experience made her an honorary member of the prestigious “Tailhook Club,” usually reserved for fighter pilots.
Prior to its relocation to the LeMonde air station, Parker said “Homecoming” was displayed on board the USS Hornet, which is a
marine museum docked at the former Naval Air Station in Alameda. “There was an event, and I was invited, I had a color guard and they [said], ‘We have our artist with us tonight, would you please stand up.’ They were very proud to have the painting on board,” she said.
Parker was also given a studio aboard the Hornet museum for a number of years, where she taught art to children.
Though painting the Navy has not been the only focus of Parker’s long career in her San Francisco studio – her website highlights her work in landscapes, portraits, still life and a series of paintings done for the Royal Horse Guard in Windsor, England, and her resume lists one-woman shows across the country and globe – Parker said her connection to the Navy was significant to her career.
“I have to see that there was a plan to it all throughout,” Parker mused. “The easiest route would have been Rhode Island [School of Design] to Yale, and then New York comes up to see what other artists are doing. But it would not have led me in the Navy direction at all.”
Editor’s Note: The print of “Homecoming” is on display at the Classical commons Museum, along with a collection of other paintings donated by Parker. The museum is open the Second Saturday of the month from noon to 2 p.m. To check on hours and regulations during COVID-19, call 413-733-3030.
To view the poster presentation on Youtube visit https://youtu.be/4itEfDCXZHk
To view more of Wilma Parker’s work, visit her website, http://wilmaparker.com/Home.html
