Building on her training as a landscape watercolorist, Betty Parsons’s 1950s works on paper are direct and often 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 the “sheer energy” of a place — in this instance Southold, NY where she would later establish her studio designed by sculptor Tony Smith. Deft “plein-air” works like Southold (1952) revel in an animated, playful fluidity that stands in contrast to the considered formalism of the artist’s paintings from this period. Active and energetic—like Parsons herself—these gouaches offer a personal connection to one of the seminal figures who shaped twentieth-century art.