Throughout her life, Betty Parsons traveled extensively, and she meticulously recorded her travels in her journals as watercolors and sketches. Though trained as a landscape painter, in 1947, she began to paint abstractly. She described this shift as an effort to capture not what a place or event “looked like, but what it made [her] feel.” This small scale untitled 1953 work came directly from the artist’s notebook, a record of a place she had visited. Using the back of her paintbrush, Parsons scrapes through wet gouache in rhythmic, free gestures. In describing works of this nature, the art critic Roberta Smith notes, “gouaches here resemble sinuous road maps, while others isolate shapes of color on contrasting grounds, like islands in a sea, or windows in the corner of a room. Inevitably several shapes are finished off with enlivening scribbles that scratch through to reveal contrasting shades beneath.”