Michael Parkes was born in 1944 in Sikeston Missouri (USA) After studying graphic art and painting at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, he taught briefly at Kent State University in Ohio and at the University of Florida. His ultimate goal was to turn his attention to creating art. A child of the hippie generation, he realized, at the age of 24, he needed to see the world in order to be a complete artist.
When he met his wife, Maria, they left the United States. After travelling through Europe, they went to India, Nepal and Pakistan, but it were the experiences he had in India, where he studied philosophy and the esoteric doctrines of the East and the West that were of great influence to his artwork. His imagery is drawn from a range of wisdoms including the cabalistic and the tantric, but embodied in forms from his own imagination which are immediately accessible.
In 1975 Michael Parkes settled definitively in Spain where he engaged in the development of his artwork and where he still lives today. Early on, he painted in the generally abstract expressionist style common among his teachers, but after his pause for reflection he began to draw and paint in a meticulous style of detailed representation which enabled him to give full expression to his inner world of images. Here strange beasts encounter mysterious winged women, good and evil fight out their immemorial conflict and in this weightless environment worlds are unmade and remade nearer to the heart's desire. Even as a student Parkes was fascinated by various graphic processes, and until 2002 he was highly proficient in the difficult medium of the colour stone lithograph.