It’s not hard to trace the origins of Robert Parks’ pairing of flight and art.

For the 82-year-old Auburn resident and painter, the love of flying and illustrating the hardware and experiences – real or imagined – of his youth began with his parents.

“He (my dad) was an architect and an artist,” Parks said. “I picked art up from dad, he was an incredibly good architect. He worked all over the East Coast, he was an expert on churches. He was also a consulting artist on the renovation of the White House in 1948, under Truman.

“He did a lot of design work on the Washington National Cathedral,” he added. “He was very highly regarded by the people at the cathedral.”

With his love of art firmly implanted by his father, Parks said it took awhile for his love of aviation to worm its way into his art.

“I was drawing from the very beginning,” he said. “I can’t think of a time that I wasn’t drawing something. I have so many varied interests that art wasn’t something I concentrated on. I didn’t go to art school or anything like that. I didn’t get started serious with painting until I was laid off from Boeing in 1970. I needed to find a way to make a living, although it wasn’t much of a living. So I started painting aviation.”

Parks said his mother fostered his love of aviation when he was a little boy.

“There were six kids, and she worked very hard,” Parks said. “And she would take a break and go down to the old Washington/Hoover Airport and watch airplanes. She would throw my sister and me in the Hupmobile and watch airplanes. That hooked me right then and there.”

As he grew so did his love for airplanes.

“During the Depression when we had to move to a defunct farm out in Potomac, Maryland, it was on the route from Pittsburgh and Cleveland, and I remember watching these planes go clattering by. I read books and magazines about planes. They even had a radio show, sponsored by the Richfield Oil Company called “The Air Adventures of Jimmie Allen.” I would listen to that and order things like a pair of tin wings or a secret code ring. I had all that.”

He took his first ride into the wild blue in 1935.

“I got my first airplane ride June 19, 1935 for my ninth birthday,” he said. “It was a two-cylinder Aeronca C-2. My parents scrimped and saved to get the $25 for my ride. It was the tail end of the Depression, but they did that for me.”

When the family moved to Florida, Parks began haunting local airports, doing whatever he could to get a chance to hitch a ride.

After several years working with crop dusters as a row flagger, letting the pilots know where to drop their chemicals, Parks said he joined the Air Force Reserve in 1943.

Although fate conspired to keep the young pilot from completing courses that would have allowed him to fly a plane during World War II, Parks said he took every chance to get up airborne, flying as a crew member on B-24s and B-17s.

In 1946 Parks finally got his pilot’s license and continued to fly until a stroke grounded him in 2002.

“I still have a lot flying with my son now though,” he said.

Parks attended Duke University, and in 1950 his love for aviation led him to the Pacific Northwest where he went to work for Boeing as an installation illustration artist on airplanes from the B-52 to the later versions of the 777.

It was while he was at Boeing that Parks made his first foray into painting airplanes.

His first painting came in 1970, depicting a Dehavilland DH-4 mail plane trying to make its way down through a layer of fog.

“I just put it together in my head from an experience my wife and I had flying back from California,” Parks said. “I had built an antique plane and flew it down there several times. We had to find a hole in the fog to get down through. And I though, ‘Jeez, a lot of the airmail guys had to do that in the early 20s.’ They would be flying on top and see a hole with land or a farm and try to get through and keep flying. A lot of them died that way. And that’s what I painted my first painting.”

Parks said his second painting, a mail plane flying in the moonlight over the Midwest, caught the eye of author and civil aviator Ernest K. Gann.

“He bought it and talked me into getting together with him and illustrating a series of short stories he was doing for aviation magazines,” Parks said. “So I did that for two years, and it was so well received that McMillan Publishing put it together in a book.”

Published in 1974, the book “Ernest Gann’s Flying Circus,” featured 20 paintings done by Parks.

“It was pretty exciting,” he said. “They wanted me to do the cover too, so I did. I didn’t get hardly any money for it, but he did such a nice job writing everything.”

According to Parks, the book then led to a request from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C., which was looking for art for the new Airship and Balloon wing at the Aerospace Museum.

“It opened July 1976 during the bicentennial celebration,” he said. “It was a painting of the Graf Zeppelin arriving at Rio De Janeiro. They saw it in the book and asked if they could borrow the painting. I told them it was sold, but did a new one for them.”

Although Parks said he still works on paintings of planes, he has branched out, painting maritime subjects and cars.

Recently, the Coos Bay Maritime Musuem in Oregon selected three of his maritime paintings out of 250 other paintings for inclusion in the museum. Park’s paintings are also on display at Fields and Company restaurant at the Sound Transit Plaza.

Fields and Company will host a meet-the-artist event with Parks from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. June 30. He will be at the restaurant from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. July 5 during the Auburn International Farmers Market.

“I like recapturing things,” Parks said of the reason he continues to paint. “My head is full of visions and compositions and ideas. I like to see if I can capture them adequately. Then I’m happy and go on to the next one. I am constantly getting ideas, and I hate seeing them shelved. I like the challenge of seeing if I can get what I’m painting to look like what’s in my head. And I never do, but people seem to like them.

“And I get satisfaction out of people seeing them and getting something, some kind of reaction from them,” he added. “That’s the main thing.”