Roger Parish's background in art is painting and printmaking. His works have received numerous awards, and he exhibits widely in the Philadelphia area and elsewhere. He has studied printmaking at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and is a member of the Guild of Papermakers based in Philadelphia.
Roger Parish has a background in both science and art. He has a Ph.D. in chemistry and worked in pharmaceutical R&D. Therefore, in art, Roger is driven by nature to be an experimenter with mediums, always looking for a different way to do things to achieve a unique effect. In recent years he has worked mostly with printmaking and handmade paper from the oriental fibers gampi and kozo. His etchings and monoprints are often on handmade paper. His naturally colored mulberry papers and monoprints containing fiber trees are particularly unique.
He has enjoyed exploring the flexibility and unique image-creating possibilities of the medium of clayprinting. This involves the creation of a monotype image with water-based pigments on a slab of wet clay and transferring the image to paper or canvas.
He also has studied lapidary and jewelry making in Philadelphia and Arizona, and is a certified instructor in precious metal clay by the PMC Guild. He seeks out especially beautiful stones, such as rare jaspers, opals, or dinosaur bone, cuts them into special shapes such as arrowheads, and sets them as two-sided pendants in pure silver.
Roger Parish is a member of the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe of upstate New York. His works often contain Indian themes or symbols. Several of his works are represented in the permanent collection of the Iroquois Indian Museum in Howes Cave, NY, the Colgate University Museum, the Mashantucket Pequot Museum in Connecticut, the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, and the New York State Museum in Albany. A collection of his works was on a traveling exhibit in Europe and Canada during 2003-2005. He is a contributor to the ART in Embassies Program with the U.S. State Department.