Travel, both domestic and international, was a central part of Betty Parsons’s life, and she took great pleasure in journeying to exhibitions, meeting artists, and exploring destinations for learning and recreation. She documented these trips in over 200 notebooks and sketchbooks over the course of her life, which contain both sketched and painted compositions recording impressions of her experiences. Reflecting on Parsons’s long-term engagement with the sketchbook, writer Lawrence Alloway observed that her practice “rests on a basic assumption of art as life’s running companion. A moment of life equals a painting.” This untitled (1958) work demonstrates the vivid color and expressive gesture with which Parsons worked in the medium of gouache. Casting a dramatic white light on a diagonal plane across a field of blue, Parsons draws her viewer’s gaze in sweeping motions over the compositional surface—using biometric forms in contrasting yellows tones to sweep the eye from one corner to the next. Further activating the compositional surface, Parsons used the back of her paintbrush to etch into the wet pigment.