Ray Parker was an influential art teacher and an important Color Field painter[2] and an instrumental figure in the movement coined by Clement Greenberg called Post-Painterly Abstraction.
Parker was also a great admirer of the painter Henri Matisse and he looked to this artist’s work for inspiration in terms of color and form, especially in his paintings of the 1970s and 1980s.
By the late 1950s, he taught at Hunter College in New York City and he developed a singular style of painting that focused on intense color and simple geometric shapes.
At that time the Kootz Gallery represented important living artists such as Pablo Picasso, Pierre Soulages, Hans Hofmann, Zao Wou Ki as well as Ray Parker.
Ray Parker's works relate to and predict the minimalist and Color Field paintings of the 1960s, made popular by American artists such as Morris Louis, Friedel Dzubas, Jules Olitski, Kenneth Noland, Helen Frankenthaler, and Ellsworth Kelly.