Paintings

In the years following 1947, Parsons made several hundred canvas paintings. Across her canvases, she developed an idiosyncratic visual vocabulary built from her reevaluation of modernist gestures. They include bright, flat colors; compositional asymmetry; clustered, irregular shapes outlined with a contrasting color; and fields of paint brushed on decisively in layers and in a uniform direction—seemingly quickly—leaving lower colors or primer exposed between or at the ends of strokes. These formal attributes appear with rough consistency throughout Parsons’s canvases, indicating an artist who was in command of her materials and who was painting—consciously, habitually, reflexively. By the same token, Parsons’s paintings evince a stylistic heterogeneity that does not map especially neatly into periodization.