Works on Paper

In the years following 1947, Parsons made several hundred canvas paintings and even more works on paper. These dynamic, intimately scaled works foreground the artist’s signature approach: fortifying the nonrepresentational with the richness of lived experience. Building on her training as a landscape watercolorist, Parsons’s 1950s works on paper are direct and urgent interpretations of impressions, places, and times. Rather than making a journal entry or taking a photograph of a particular moment, Parsons was known to open her sketchbook and set gouache to paper as she sought to capture what she described as the “sheer energy” or “invisible presence” of a place. 

Even after Parsons was able to concentrate on her painting practice following the construction of her Tony Smith-designed studio in Southold, Long Island in 1960, she remained committed to creating works on paper. Her notebooks and sketchbooks reveal the extent of her expressive improvisation, which would ultimately influence her paintings and sculpture.