Two Paintings, One Story: Aussie artists Colin and Colleen Parker (#451)

There were two paintings in my childhood home that felt less like decoration and more like members of the family.

One hung above my father’s desk: The Macquarie River near Dubbo, NSW by Colin Parker, painted in the early 1960s.

The other watched over my mother’s room: Through Winter Trees by Colleen Parker, dated 1984, and purchased by my mother after my father’s death.

For decades I thought of them simply as Dad’s painting and Mum’s painting. Two separate choices, two separate sensibilities.

Only recently did I discover that Colin Parker and Colleen Parker were husband and wife.

Suddenly, the quiet dialogue between those two canvases took on a whole new life.

The river above my father’s desk

My father’s painting of the Macquarie River feels utterly, unmistakably Australian.

Colin Parker, born in New South Wales in 1941, built his reputation on vibrant, naturalistic oil paintings of inland Australia. Outback towns, working farms, stockyards, and the long, dusty roads between them.

His work includes scenes like Farm near Bathurst NSW, Outstation Stockyards near Wanaaring, and Waterbore west of Thargomindah, each one a small hymn to the resilience and rough beauty of rural life.

You can feel that same sensibility in The Macquarie River near Dubbo NSW, only here the river has stopped moving altogether. The bed lies exposed and pale, a scar of cracked clay winding through the landscape after a long drought. On either side, the river gums lean in, holding the banks together with their gnarled roots, their shadows stretching across the

empty channel where water once ran.

It’s not a sentimental view. The painting understands things that don’t appear on the canvas: the smell of dust after rain, the low hum of cicadas, the way heat seems to buzz above the ground in summer.

Above my father’s desk, that painting became a kind of window into the wide, working landscapes that shaped so many Australian stories in the mid-20th century.

Colin Parker is often described as largely self-taught, the son of a water colorist who ran Parker Galleries in Sydney, and his paintings carry that blend of formal sensitivity and lived observation.

In this Macquarie scene, he gives the river dignity without romanticizing it. It’s simply there.

Winter trees in my mother’s room

If Colin’s river speaks of breadth and distance, Colleen Parker’s Through Winter Trees draws you inward.

Colleen M. Parker (1944–2008), born in New South Wales, is best known as a landscape painter in oils, whose work was widely exhibited in the Sydney region.

Her canvases carry the names of country places that resonate with anyone who knows rural New South Wales: Orange, Mudgee, Hill End, Lyndhurst.

They’re not the outback proper, but that quieter, patchwork landscape of farms, small towns, and old gold-mining villages that sit a comfortable day’s drive from Sydney.

Unlike the broad sweep of a river view, Through Winter Trees feels intimate. The composition turns your attention to the foreground - branches and the thin tracery of twigs, stripped of their leaves. The eye threads its way between them, towards whatever soft suggestion of country life lies beyond.

Winter in rural Australia is rarely dramatic. It’s less about snow and more about stillness: pale light and frosty mornings. Colleen captures that mood. The palette leans into soft greys and subdued ochres, the landscape temporarily hushed. It is not bleak, but it is spare. The land is in a holding pattern, waiting for spring.

This was the painting my mother chose for her bedroom.

Where my father’s river spoke of space and work, my mother’s trees offered reflection. You don’t stand in front of Through Winter Trees and think about distances; you think about pauses, about the seasons, in a life when the leaves have dropped and you’re left with bones and structure and memory.

Colleen Parker studied at the Royal Art Society of New South Wales and under Kevin Oxley, which comes through in her confident handling of oil and the way she uses composition to lead the viewer’s gaze.

But her paintings are never just exercises in craft. They are homely in the best sense of the word: grounded in farms, cottages, modest roads and stands of trees that feel genuinely lived in.

A marriage of eyes on rural Australia

What transforms these two paintings, for me, is the knowledge that they were painted by a married couple.

Colleen Parker is recorded in Australian art references quite simply as:

Born in New South Wales,

Colleen Parker is the wife of artist Colin Parker.

It’s a simple line, but suddenly the paintings in my home are part of a much larger story. A shared life spent looking, together, at the breadth and texture of rural Australia.

Colin’s work often stretches the eye outward: Central Australian desert, stockyards near Wanaaring, waterbores in far-western Queensland, broad farms near Bathurst.

His paintings are about scale, distance, and the infrastructure of rural work - windmills, fences, wagons, small towns baked under enormous skies.

Colleen’s canvases, by contrast, frequently gravitate towards the lived-in details of the rural landscape: cottages at Hill End, landscapes near Orange, a farm at Lyndhurst, a grove of winter trees.

Her gaze seems to settle where people have stayed put: at the kitchen gate, in the shelter of a line of trees, at the edge of a paddock where the house lights glow just out of frame.

Together, their work maps two complementary ways of seeing rural Australia:

• The working horizon.

• Rivers, roads, stock routes, and the big movements of animals, vehicles, weather fronts, and people.

• This is Colin’s territory, where you sense dust in the throat and a whole day’s work ahead.

• The quiet enclosure.

• Yards, trees, homesteads, and the intimate geometry of branches, roofs, and garden fences.

• This is Colleen’s world, where you feel the kettle boiling in a farmhouse kitchen and the calm of a winter afternoon.

  
  

Seen side by side, one above a desk, one above a bed, the paintings echo the balance inside many rural households: outward labor and inward care, landscape as workplace and landscape as refuge.

Living with their landscapes

The paintings have moved with me over the years. They now hang on the walls of my current home, far from the childhood house where my parents first chose them, each for their own reasons.

I sometimes imagine that, without knowing it, my parents had selected not just two paintings, but two halves of a conversation between artists:

• My father drawn to the strength and structure of the river, the sense of a task-filled day in a practical, working landscape.

• My mother drawn to the stillness of winter trees, the softer spaces where thought and memory have room to wander.

  
  

The discovery that Colin and Colleen were husband and wife hasn’t changed the paintings themselves, of course. But it has deepened my relationship with them.

I now see them as part of a shared life’s work. Two artists tracing the same country with different emphases, different rhythms, and different emotional temperatures.

In a time when rural Australia is often reduced to headlines - drought, fire, flood, commodity prices - these paintings remind me of the slower truths: the way light falls on a river bend near Dubbo; the hush of a paddock glimpsed through bare trees in winter; the quiet, stubborn endurance of people who call these landscapes home.

Every day, as I walk past the river and the winter trees, I’m grateful that my parents brought Colin and Colleen Parker’s vision into our family story, long before any of us realized just how closely those visions were intertwined.

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