Though Parsons’ shifted from her roots as a landscape painter toward abstraction in 1947, a sense of place remained essential throughout her enduring artistic practice. This untitled (1950) work calls attention to the artist’s innate ability to at once capture the essence of a given environment, while also transforming subjective experience into compositions that feel universal and familiar. In describing works of this nature, critic Roberta Smith noted, “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.” In this untitled gouache, one can discern hints of pale and dark blue shades of sky penetrating planes of thick green brush, as Parsons employs a sgraffito technique to scratch through layers of gauche, applied in varying viscosities, to outline organic forms. Pastel blue, pink, and yellow frame the composition in cloudy lines produced by using a frayed, dry brush against the paper’s surface—drawing the viewer’s eye inward to the more vivid iterations of the same pigments. A brilliant red, applied sparingly, strategically imbues the composition with a sense of warmth, while also suggesting the shifting of time from day to night.