Daisy Parris: Clouds for Breakfast

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Daisy Parris, “Storms For Breakfast,” 2024

oil paint on canvas, 86⅝ × 141¾ in (courtesy of the Gallery)

Opening Reception on Thursday, March 6, from 5 to 8 pm.

In this collection of bold, large-scale abstract paintings, Parris invites the weather in, lets it linger, and stain the walls. As Haruki Murakami writes in Kafka on the Shore, "When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in." Parris' paintings embody this transformation: they are the storm you walk into—ferocious, tender, and unsettling—and the remnants you carry out, capturing the quiet reckoning that emerges when internal and external forces collide, shape, and transform the viewer.

The colors in Parris' work drift in muted, pastel harmonies, evoking distant landscapes bathed in fleeting light—reminiscent of Monet’s morning haze or Renoir’s breezy forest. Yet beneath this serenity, there is rupture. Paint is not simply applied; it is carved and clawed back, as though weathered by unseen tempests. Layers of pigment emerge like geological strata—raw and unguarded—revealing histories beneath the surface. The gestural movements are not passive strokes but fierce, urgent marks—scratches and sweeps that pulse with the energy of an unbound storm, a dance between emergence and erosion.

Through visceral textures and carved gestures, Parris engages in a process of weathering—stripping the paint back, exposing rawness, then layering it again, with poetry stitched like flags in the wind. Language does not sit neatly on the canvas; it is absorbed, blurred, broken, and rebuilt. In one of their works, it reads:

YOU WERE THE

BELLY OF THE STORM

CLOUDS FOR BREAKFAST

SCARS IN BLOOM

SCARS IN BLOOM

These words speak to the potential for redefining the unwanted—flies, rats, or dust—just as they redefine weather, carrying the possibility of endless meanings.

Alongside the paintings, works on paper serve as quieter echoes—controlled, structured reflections on grief, love, and loss. If the paintings are storms, these are the hushed spaces left in their wake. Across both bodies of work, contradictions live and breathe: light and dark, destruction and renewal, silence and fury. The paintings do not offer answers but rather “bring out the story in a way that is neither too loud nor too quiet.” In Parris' work, the storm is not merely carried; it is shared, stretched across both canvas and paper. These works hold space for queerness to endure, for wounds to heal, and for storms to care for us, even as they rage. In Clouds for Breakfast, weather becomes a presence, a witness, and a hand to hold through the tempests of becoming.