"Parked" captures the essence of an older couple's quiet resignation to the natural ebb and flow of life. Through its vibrant yet chaotic pencil, crayon, and marker composition, the piece conveys a sense of being out of step with the world—a feeling reinforced by the exaggerated, almost cartoonish forms of the figures. Normally, one goes for a walk n the park to recharge through a brief exposure to a natural environment. But in the swirling textures of the tree and the irregular lines give the environment a restless quality, contrasting with the couple's stillness on the bench. This suggests that while life moves and changes around them, they are weary and unable to keep pace, a poignant reflection of aging.
The rich colors and layered textures evoke a lively and dynamic world, even as the couple appears to have surrendered to entropy. The large, sheltering tree looms overhead, perhaps symbolizing the weight of time itself. Its sprawling branches, reaching out in all directions, mirror the couple's tangled feelings of fatigue and being overwhelmed by life's unstoppable motion. Despite the vividness of the scene, there’s a sense that they are adrift, "parked" in a moment in which moving forward feels as futile as resisting the natural decay of things.
Skyler reflects the tension between vitality and decay, between the bright colors of living and the heaviness that comes with age. He conveys an understandable but unfortunate resignation to the fuller impact of entropy on the human experience over time. The couple's quiet presence suggests they are not fighting the flow but sitting in it, tired yet enduring.
In "Parked," the struggle against the loss of energy leading to an unwinding of order, as an essential struggle to life, is not resisted but embraced at this moment of shared stillness.
