My language and passion is working with color. My patterns are densely populated; and I would attribute this to my endless love for painting. It excites me when a dialogue begins with a single motif, flower, square, or stem, and gradually transforms into a kind of symphonic experience. I never pre-plan anything I paint. It is the "unknown", the instinctive exploration that inspires me, and keeps the process fresh, always. Perhaps this is what has kept my work apart from other designs in the industry over the years. The unacademic quality, the naive forms in their asymmetrical, and organic placements are like DNA – uniquely their own, unrepeatable. In the past, when asked by agents whom I had worked with for a short time, why I didn’t trace or place my designs down first before plunging into the act of painting… it was precisely this —the "human element," however "imperfect" in it’s final and only execution, seemed to keep it at a safe and honest distance from the cookie-cut industry standard of "beauty" and "perfection."

Ever since I was a child, I was attracted to working with vivid colors. I now understand that colors have healing powers, even though as I paint, I am not consciously assembling them. Painting has always provided me with a kind of sacred space, where I could freely express my insatible love for spending hours amid rich color, as well as lose myself in the infinite landscape of pattern and design. Over the years, through a serious musical career as a classical flutist, where I had the memorable privilege of working with the late Leonard Bernstein at Tanglewood, reeling in all the musical riches of that early career, I always found the time to paint. And as I push my brushes, I am aware that all the great pieces of music which were, and remain, an integral part of my life - from the dashes and leaps of Prokofiev’s "Romeo and Juliet," to the gentle, caressing melodies of Ravel’s "Mother Goose Suite" still course through me, and I believe have escaped into the rhythm of my designs.

With the Kim Parker Home collections of bedding, bath, designer rugs, silk tapestries, dinnerware, giftware, fabrics, decorative pillows, furniture, wall art and stationery, I wish to bring passion and exuberance, and unbridled joy into as many homes as possible, where color can heal, and where positive energy can be felt--even in the shower curtain! I wish for nothing to be so commercial that any of these motifs compromises their true dance.

Kim Parker