“There was a casual attitude to his attitude toward his work,” said Joe Ciardiello, an illustrator who was a friend of Parker. “Many artists can get very picky about the right type of paper, the right pen or the right paints. But Bob used everything he had: people gave him paint, he used cheap and expensive things. He wasn’t very valuable about it.”
Robert Andrew Parker was born on May 14, 1927 in Norfolk, Virginia. His father, William, was a dentist who, due to his position in the US Public Health Service, moved his family around occasionally. His mother, Harriett (Cowdin) Parker, was an amateur artist who kept her son supplied with art supplies.
Bob began his artistic work in earnest when, after contracting tuberculosis when he was 8 or 9, he and his family moved from Michigan to Fort Stanton, New Mexico, in search of a more arid climate. He spent most of the next two years in a bed on a covered porch, reading voraciously and drawing battle scenes from the Second Italo-Ethiopian War and the Second Sino-Japanese War, based on radio accounts of the conflicts.
After serving in the Army Air Corps as an aircraft and engine mechanic, he enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago and graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1952. He then moved to New York City, where one of his prints was included in a Young Artists exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He taught art for a few years at the New York School for the Deaf, studied for a summer at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and developed his printmaking skills at the Atelier 17 studio.
Then an unusual opportunity arose. MGM asked him to come to Paris to work on “Lust for Life,” the 1956 biopic starring Kirk Douglas as Vincent van Gogh.
The original plan was for Parker and Douglas's hands to alternate on the screen, where they would appear to be creating Van Gogh paintings. But they worked on only one, “Wheat Field with Crows,” before Parker's job became copying about 100 Van Gogh drawings and paintings for use in the film. With his earnings he bought enough paint in France to last 12 years.
