Early Work

Parsons's early work is intimately tied to her travels—both around the United States and internationally—exploring destinations through both educational and recreational lenses. Throughout the 1920s, Parsons studied with sculptors Antoine Bourdelle and Ossip Zadkine in Paris, as well as with Arthur Lindsay, a landscape painter. In 1933, Parsons returned to New York via California, where she taught and made sculpture, continuing all the while to paint portraits and sketchbook-sized landscapes in which villages appear across a grassy expanse or tiny white boats bespeckle an inviolable sea. Parsons often drew on a sense of place in her work, and through her training in landscape painting, developed keen powers of observation before beginning to paint abstractly in 1947. Parsons described this shift as an effort to capture not what a place or event “looked like, but what it made [her] feel.”