The incomparable Molly Parkin was in fine and filthy-mouthed form as she celebrated what was astonishingly her 85th birthday at the Stash Gallery this week. The gallery in London’s Whitechapel area is showing an exhibition of her accomplished and multifarious paintings spanning nearly six decades (until 11 March).
Parkin is best known as an icon of the Swinging Sixties, a legendary fashion editor for Nova magazine and the Sunday Times, who swung higher and harder than most, and went on to become a famously raunchy novelist, journalist and TV celebrity. Yet painting has always been her most enduring love. “I came to hate the fucking fashion business, but I needed to pay the bills,” admits the woman who won Fashion Editor of the Year in 1971.
Growing up in the Welsh valleys, she was “always top in art” and in 1949 won a scholarship to study art at Goldsmiths, University of London, followed by a stint at Brighton School of Art. It was only after her first marriage to the art dealer Michael Parkin ended that she hung up her paintbrushes and launched herself into the world of fashion, sex and celebrity. “The muse left me—I didn't paint a thing for 25 years.”
In 1987 she picked them up again, following a Damascene moment when, lying in the gutter after a particularly mammoth bender, she heard the voice of her dead grandmother. “She said, ‘Bach, that’s your last drink.” She hasn't, she says, touched a drink or cigarette since. She’s also celibate, having had a final encounter with an Australian surfer in Las Vegas. “He was 23, I was 73—it was the best I ever had.”
Now, happily ensconced in a small flat on the King’s Road, Chelsea, painted in brilliant pinks, reds and oranges, the sober and productive Ms P paints and writes poetry every day between 4am and 7am—“my most creative time.”
Her infinitely various works are currently lining the walls of the Stash Gallery. They range from large, dark, gloweringly impasto oils of her native Welsh coast painted in the early 1960s, to vibrant watercolours, gouaches and acrylics charting subsequent roamings in India, Scotland and the South Pole. There’s also an abundance of small vivacious paintings and drawings made as recently as last week. That 25-year hiatus notwithstanding, those works ALL confirm that “artist” now needs to be writ large at the top of the rich and various Parkin CV.
And while they may no longer be in her life, Molly’s lovers remain omnipresent in her art. Among them is a fondly remembered drawing of a naked clinch with US blues singer Bo Diddley and another of that now notorious “Las Vegas lay”. Good golly, Ms Molly, indeed!