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Oct 15, 2026US

Michael Parkes "Angel Affair" Framed Lithograph on Paper 1944

Michael Parkes (American-born, living in Spain, b. 1944). "Angel Affair" stone lithograph on paper, 1986. Edition 145 of 250. Hand-signed and numbered with blindstamp at lower right. A hand-signed color stone lithograph by Michael Parkes, "Angel Affair," numbered 145 from an edition of 250 and blindstamped at lower right. Heaven, here, arrives without warning. A sober gentleman in a dark charcoal suit is swept clean off his feet by a nude angel on rose-blushed wings. Her auburn curls press to his face in a kiss so complete that his bowler hat sails free into the air. Far beneath their soaring embrace, a whisper of horizon holds a small town and its church spire, serenely unaware. Parkes renders the lovers with a jeweler's precision, then lets the angel's legs and trailing ribbon dissolve into delicate, pencil-like line, as if the vision were still materializing on the pale mint ground. The sheet is presented in a double mat within a beaded gilt frame. Michael Parkes (born 1944, Sikeston, Missouri) is an American artist who has long lived in Spain. His meticulous paintings, stone lithographs, and sculptures have made him one of the best-known figures in Magic Realism and fantasy art. He grew up in Canalou, Missouri, a hamlet of fewer than 300 people, and drew before he could read. He found his first sense of wonder in the cowboys and cardboard monsters of the local cinema. He studied art and art history at the University of Kansas, where his teachers were still under the spell of the New York Abstract Expressionists, and he taught briefly before leaving to travel. In 1970, newly married to the artist and musician Maria Sedoff, Parkes gave up teaching and went to India. There the couple studied Integral Yoga and the philosophy of Sri Aurobindo, and he stopped painting altogether. Later, in Spain, a chance look at a neighbor's canvas (a quiet scene of two horses in a stable) brought him back to the easel. The style he developed was formed largely on his own: realistic in technique and magical in subject, with winged women, fabulous beasts, and the endless struggle of good and evil drawn from cabalistic and tantric traditions. He went on to master color stone lithography, and many of his recent works have been issued as limited-edition Aurographics (giclee prints). His images have appeared on the covers of OMNI and many science fiction anthologies, and his painting The Three Graces features in Dan Brown's novel The Lost Symbol (2009). Parkes was nominated for a Chesley Award in 1994 and again in 2003. He and his wife still return to India every year. Item # 205207

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Michael Parkes "Angel Affair" Framed Lithograph on Paper 1944

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