Teeth of the Temple (c. 1970) reflects Betty Parsons’s approach to abstraction: never hard-edged, not exactly gestural or biomorphic, but always colorful, playful, bold, and expressive. Parsons persistently used geometric forms to suggest the natural world—not in terms of specific topography, but instead to capture the effects of light and color. Indeed, the saturated oranges, ochres, and maroons of Teeth of the Temple evoke the autumn landscape outside the artist's studio in Southold, Long Island. Ultimately, Parsons's associative approach to abstraction allowed her to paint lyrical compositions whose rhythmic arrangements of shapes infuse the pictorial flatness of modernism with a dynamic immediacy.