Love Comes Quietly

Often heralding a show opening of the Harrison Center’s Harrison Gallery, the billboard image at 16th & Delaware sometimes matches my mood, sometimes not. On each morning commute of the past two weeks, Jay Parnell’s “Great Day in the Morning!” – image and title inspired by Parnell’s grandpa, who always began a day with this proclamation – has met me precisely where I am . . . greeted and calmed me and set the day’s tone just right.

Parnell said about his current show that he would welcome such an individualized reaction . . . that whatever the show evokes in me is what it’s meant to be about for me. And true for the next and the next person who interacts with this new body of work, titled “Love Comes Quietly.” 

Informal crowd-sourcing from the First Friday opening proves Parnell’s point . . . that each viewer is invited to bring their own self, own stories, own stances to the work and be moved accordingly. Harrison Center visitors offered up reactions as eclectic as the crowd itself:

Detailed

Colorful

Mysterious

Joy & sadness

Haunting

Beautiful

Tender & timely

Meditative

Calm

Serene

Gothic

Poignant 

Peaceful

Easy-on-the-eyes

You want to keep looking at it; nothing is jarring

Un-natural lighting in natural settings (theatrical)

Purity

Haunting [again]

Sobering / somber

Adroit

Depth / profound / more going on

Window into human-ness / no shutters between us and subjects

Haunting [third time]

A painterly response from a fellow artist noted that the show “feels like it comes from deep wells, like all the space behind [the figures] goes really deep” into mysteries we cannot know but want to wonder about.

Not wanting to prescribe his viewers’ experience, Parnell allows this much: “The exhibit explores quiet ways in which love permeates our lives.” For these quiet studies, Parnell chose oil on wood panels and watercolor and gouache on paper, inspired by and interspersed with some of Parnell’s favorite poems of others (including “Love Comes Quietly,” Robert Creeley) and verse from Parnell’s own journals. The writings are an extra sweet treat, bringing still more layered revelations to whatever each of us carries into the space. One viewer noted that including poems and verse in the show (displayed in Parnell’s own hand) is a “double beauty.”

There are a few periwinkle-ish skies so weird and other-worldly in their weather that you may want to run away into them for a surreal break from day-to-day ordinary life. (Just me?) There are gilt skulls and crowns of curls. There are blooms and birds and faces, faces, faces that let you read there in the eyes whatever it is that you, particularly you, are bringing to the room.

 “Love Comes Quietly” can be viewed in the Harrison Gallery throughout August during gallery hours: Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. It is also available for viewing in our online gallery through September.