He began exhibiting at the Royal Academy while still a graduate student and achieved immediate success as a portrait painter, undertaking the famous Pear's Portrait Commission as well as many private commissions. Parks moved to New York in the late seventies and has exhibited widely in the United States and Britain over the last thirty years. His painting has focussed largely on English themes in which he has explored the nature of personal and national identity through a long series of highly original images of English life.