Bob Parks opens exhibition of Sway portraits at Forest Deli

WELL-known Sway characters are the focus of a new art exhibition at Forest Deli.

The art show, which will run for a month and a half, features paintings of six local subjects selected by avant-garde artist Bob Parks.

Also a resident of Sway, Bob (77) was the subject of a 2016 BBC documentary entitled The R&B Feeling: the Bob Parks Story. He now hopes that the local portrait showcase will lead to a more significant project that will see him painting gang members and victims of rape.

“I chose six subjects who are very well known in the village – Barry Rickman, Michael Monaghan, Janet Kirk, Mark Drury, Denzel Batchelor and Angela El-cargly. I only had an hour-and-a-half to paint each portrait.”

Village Portraits was conceived as a pilot scheme for a much more ambitious project to be displayed at the Far Sight Gallery in Soho at the end of summer. For this exhibition Bob plans to approach local gangs in Southampton and Portsmouth and go on to do 10 portraits for the show.

This project has also been partly inspired by the decade that Bob spent living in Hollywood in the 1970s. He revealed: “There was a lot of gang activity – it was the Cholos and the Cholas from the Mexican American community.

“I wanted to do their portraits before they got arrested or shot while they still retained their dignity in their identity and feed it back to them through my portraits – to give them back the control they so much desired.”

Bob recalls: “Then, of course, there were the Bloods and the Crips. My church was on 96th and Broadway – right in the middle of the Hoover Crips, the most vicious gang in LA. We were literally dodging bullets coming out of church. I wanted to paint them to preserve their self-image.”

Bob also plans to paint 10 portraits of rape victims in a bid to help the healing process and support them in gaining repossession of their bodies. Bob said: “This power would be carried through the portraiture alone. There would be no mention that the subjects are either gang members or rape victims – it would all be spoken through the art.”

Bob’s exhibition of Village Portraits is displayed at Forest Deli in Middle Road, Sway, opening between 9am and 3pm, Tuesday to Saturday.