The cut-ups

The oak floorboards at the foot of Jacqueline Dee Parker’s bed have been stabbed thousands of times, routinely and without mercy. The assailant is the sharp endpin of her husband’s cello.

An LSU professor of cello and string chamber music, New York native Dennis Parker has been playing classical music since the age of 6. Now he practices less on campus and more at home in order to relax and stay sharp, but mostly to perform a melodious soundtrack to his wife’s abstract assemblages of paint and paper—or even Anderson Cooper 360.

“I do play while I watch CNN,” he says, deadpanning. As Jacqueline collages in the upstairs studio of their Southdowns home, he often sits on the edge of the bed moving his fingers over the thick strings and marking the wood below with the pivots of playing Debussy.

Across this Braille-like patch, Jacqueline walks every day, sliding her slender bare feet over the field of deep indentations that are—like a painter’s hands perpetually flecked with color—a material memorandum of the artistic life to which she and her husband have so tirelessly devoted themselves in their 25 years together.

“[The floor] is this texture of his work, his labor, everything he does musically,” says Jacqueline, a Sarah Lawrence graduate and LSU art instructor. “So it’s not always the sound of his music, but just the reality of it and the way he spends his time that is inspirational for me. I can’t say much more about his playing without sounding like a schoolgirl.”

While Dennis’ music flows through Jacqueline’s work, it was her love of dissecting old stationery and books that inspired him to do something creatively radical, something familiar and frightening with the instruments that encircle him every day.

“Sometimes I just want to go cut the head off a violin,” Dennis says.

From Jacqueline’s studio she can look down and see when Dennis’ light is on in the backyard shed. Inside the shed, he surgically slices into busted and out-of-use stringed instruments to create wing-spreading cranes and peacocks, spindly-legged beetles and other inventive sculptural remixes like eclectic shelves, music stands and miniature piano-shaped boxes.

Both husband and wife repurpose things. Both cut their art from the ordinary.

“I think Jacquie paints like a poet and writes poetry like an artist,” says painter and retired LSU art professor Edward Pramuk. “Dennis plays cello like an angel and builds his constructions like a demon. Love and mutual respect does the rest.”

From his shop, Dennis can look up and see his wife, the mother of his two teenaged children, working away in the window. She’ll call his cell phone and ask him to come up and offer his opinion on something new. He does the same. It’s the common critical give-and-take, that willing vulnerability, only intensified and soothed by the marital bond.

You didn’t get that one right.

How about this instead?

That kind of sucks.

They don’t hold back.

“We can certainly take it,” Dennis says. “But the main thing is we trust each other.”

That trust is built in part on the hunt. Their home is filled with vintage finds, the results of a joint garage sale and flea market obsession and an aesthetic gleaned from their Depression-era grandparents. Walking through IKEA is not the Parkers’ idea of shopping. “We’re constantly in re-supply mode,” Dennis says.

Whatever pieces and papers they don’t use as décor go straight to the chopping block—raw material for new works of art.

“Dennis has always been creative with birthday gifts,” Jacqueline says.

“She means cheap,” he interjects with his quick, dry wit.

“One of the greatest gifts he gave me was a lifetime supply of player piano rolls,” she says. “I use them in my work all the time. Those period fonts are delicious and delicate.”

This year, the Parkers collaborated publicly for the first time when Jacqueline read poetry and Dennis accompanied her on the cello at a Houston gallery. “We want to do more of that,” she says. “So much of our creative energies have gone into parenting, but now that our children are getting older, it’ll be interesting to see how our collaboration evolves. When he’s playing it creates all of these possibilities and networks of response. It’s like my response begins where words end.”

Jacqueline Dee Parker’s latest collection of work, along with Dennis’ Cellobird.calm (pictured), will be on display at Ann Connelly Fine Art Dec. 5 – 16. For more information on both artists, visit jacquelinedeeparker.com and dennisparkerland.com.