The exhibition is titled after Heated Sky (1976), a work on paper that comes from one of the more than 200 notebooks and sketchbooks that Parsons filled over the course of her career, and at its top edge bears the line of holes characteristic of spiral binding. The sketchbook was Parsons’ constant travel companion and a fundamental part of her artmaking practice. She frequently took inspiration in the natural world and, as her biographer Lee Hall has described, “Never once did [Parsons] record an experience… according to its appearance alone; rather, as she recorded, she simultaneously interpreted her subject, probed for and usually found its essence.” In Heated Sky the heavens are transformed into a brilliant red punctuated by cloud-like shapes in blue, green, and gold.

The completion of Parsons’ light-filled studio in Southold, NY, in 1960 ushered in a decade of work characterized by a simplification of form and color. Designed by architect and artist Tony Smith and overlooking the Long Island Sound, it fast became the artist’s regular weekend retreat and the site of concentrated art-making. In paintings such as Pasture (1963), Parsons combined a monochromatic field of color with free-floating island-like shapes in colors both analogous and complementary. Works from later in the decade introduced line-based compositions as featured in the graphic immediacy of Early Morning (1967), with its rhythmic repetition of gold and red stripes interwoven with white, black, and gray. Alongside her paintings, Parsons filled numerous sketchbooks and notebooks with spontaneous observations. Works on paper such as the red, gold, and blue Heated Sky (1976) feature highly saturated color and rhythmic brushstrokes facilitated by the fluidity of the paint.

Image: Betty Parsons: Blue sky very high, installation image, Art OMI (2018)

Counting many of the period’s leading painters among her former and current gallery artists, Parsons was immersed in the languages of abstract painting. Her own work, however, was rooted in the marriage of her powers of observation and interpretation. As she described in an interview with Lawrence Alloway in 1968, “When I start a painting I try to become a blank and only let an emotion come into me. If I say, for instance, I have an idea that I want to paint an atmosphere that I see out of the window, I try to become a blank when it comes to choice of forms and colors. I go up to the canvas with a brush and suddenly decide and I pick out a gray or brown or whatever the atmosphere is and put it on very spontaneously. That color introduces an idea for another color, and I go on from there.”