Moonlight-Maine, 1972
Acrylic on canvas, 24 x 20 inches
Inscribed on stretcher: Moonlight—Maine
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That Betty Parsons had a special feeling for the Maine coast is reflected in Moonlight—Maine, dated 1972. While not an explicit or descriptive image, the work captures an intensity of feeling that Parsons may have experienced in a place that still offered traces of the wilderness. With its strong coloristic balance of deep blue-purple and burnt-sienna-gold, the painting has a dramatic and romantic quality that diverges the more softly toned, lyrical types of images that Parsons often created elsewhere. Evoking a bird’s eye map of water and land, a glimmer of light hovering at the end of a darkening deep sea, and a sense of floating movement, the painting reveals the way that Parsons sought to synthesize and encapsulate the feeling of life in a moment. At the same time, the way in which Parsons used the canvas to explore issues of enclosure, suspension, mass, and color in relation to space reveals her deeply ingrained understanding of the abstract principles that underlay the work she had exhibited at her gallery before anyone else had seen its value. |
