Sean BW Parker
- Anna Lilli Garai
- 6 days ago
- 2 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
Sean Bw Parker paints the way he writes and makes music. Quickly, instinctively, with little interest in sticking to rules. His approach is what he calls “make, then see what I’ve made.” Most of his work is in acrylic, ink or watercolour, often built from loose lines, overlapping forms and soft shifts in colour. He doesn’t aim for realism, and rarely starts with a concept. The idea comes later, if it needs to.
His paintings move between figuration and abstraction. A face might emerge, a bottle, a window—but nothing stays fixed for long. It’s not about accurate representation. It’s about catching a mood before it fades.
There’s often a sense of motion, or disorientation, like a memory surfacing halfway. The line is never perfect, the colour doesn’t fill the shape, and that’s exactly the point.
He spent ten years living and working in Istanbul. That time left a mark. You can see it in the layering, the pattern, the way figures drift into architecture and back again. Since 2018 he’s also been active in justice reform. That too filters into the work, though not as subject matter. It’s more a way of thinking—staying alert to context, power, dissonance, and what gets left out.
Sometimes the work references real events, like protests or street life.
Other times it stays personal.
A still life, a glance, a line of poetry. It’s all material. Sean often draws connections between his visual work and songwriting—sampling, repetition, improvisation. What he doesn’t do is over-polish. The surface stays open. The viewer’s interpretation matters just as much as his.
His motto—“if it looks like it could have been made by AI, it’s not done”—isn’t just about process. It’s about presence. The marks in his paintings come from the hand, not the algorithm. The balance is always between control and chance, and he doesn’t try to resolve it. His work lets things stay in flux. What matters is that it feels alive.
