Alongside her paintings, Parsons filled numerous sketchbooks and notebooks with spontaneous observations. As Lisa Peters has observed, working in these books “provided a forum for Parsons to work out her visual ideas, reflect on her experiences, summon memories, and capture emotions.” In Golden Weather (1976), Parsons uses rich orange, brown, and gold pigments to create a light-filled space highlighted with streaks of pink and punctuated with moments of various blues. Her brushstrokes are foregrounded, with their curves playing a significant role in defining the scene. As in many of her compositions, here Parsons evoked not what a place or event “looked like,” as she put it, “but what it made [her] feel."