JONATHAN PAUL PARKER: All Shall Be Well

Catherine and Robert Palmer Gallery

JONATHAN PAUL PARKER
All Shall Be Well

January 10–March 7, 2026

The Athenaeum Art Center presents All Shall Be Well, Jonathan Paul Parker’s first solo exhibition, on view January 10–March 7, 2026. Featuring paintings and explorative drawings, Parker’s practice centers on an intuitive, process-based approach to painting that explores the threshold between perception and inner experience. Using color, gesture, and rhythm, he works in a state of focused openness that allows intuitive and archetypal forms to surface. His process draws on the idea of active imagination, where inner images and impulses rise to awareness and shape the direction of the work.

Parker’s background in drawing gave him a strong sensitivity to line, rhythm, and spatial balance, which continues to guide his approach to painting. He treats the canvas as something that reveals itself gradually, with each gesture arising from quiet attention.

His early involvement in experimental film and improvisational music also informs his sense of timing and movement. A mark can function like a note, and a composition can unfold like a score.

Through this practice, Parker creates paintings that offer a reflective space where perception and inner experience meet.

Jonathan Paul Parker lives and works in San Diego. Raised across Oklahoma, Arkansas, Georgia, and California, his itinerant upbringing informs a sustained sensitivity to narrative, rhythm, and spatial awareness. His early interest in drawing and visual structure developed alongside an engagement with moving images, leading him to study film at the California State Summer School of the Arts, before undertaking formal training in Live Action Film and Video at the California Institute of the Arts.

Drawing from decades of playing improvisational music, Parker’s painterly process is grounded in repetition, variation, and attentive presence. His work reflects an ongoing investigation into line, duration, and image-making, shaped by meditative and transcendental approaches to perception and time. Across media, Parker’s practice explores how intuition, structure, and temporality converge within the act of making.

This exhibition marks the first public presentation of Parker’s work and brings together works produced between 2018 and 2025.

CLICK TO ENLARGE THE IMAGES.