News Year Honours 2023: Ian Parmiter's art helps highlight mental health and living with Parkinson's

Ian has lived with Parkinson’s disease, the degenerative brain condition, for the past decade but he has refused to let it define him.

After six years of working away on his artwork and creating hundreds of paintings and sculptures, only showing the occasional piece in a group show or sharing things on his social media, Ian held his first ever solo exhibition in April.

Dubbed The Beauty and Pain of Being Lord Sonic, it riffed on his nickname from his role as guitarist in the long-running Portsmouth surf-punk band Emptifish. Over the course of of its two week run at Court X on Eastern Parade, Southsea, hundreds of people came to check out his unique style, which he calls ‘primitive art.’

In October, to coincide with World Mental Health Day 2022, he held another local exhibition at Artspace Portsmouth, this time called Falling Out of a Hole, of which he said at the time: ‘It explains my philosophy on life… and how I use my art to pull myself together.’

Looking back, Ian said: ‘I was really pleased with the exhibition, I put a lot of effort into it and I really enjoyed it. It was encouraging too, as I had some people with Parkinson’s come along and they told me how it helped them too.

‘I’m still doing quite a bit – drawing in my book each day, making quite a few sculptures, some paintings. I’m just going to keep going and see how it goes.’