A resident of Wichita Falls, Texas since 1946, Scottie Parsons grew up on the banks of the Red River in Texas where, as a child, she would write poetry and carve sandstone to entertain herself. She would not fully explore this early inclination to creative expression until she had already raised her own family and begun to study art at Midwestern University. Parsons has been painting professionally since 1973. Parsons’ final paintings are abstract color explorations whose imagery delves frequently into celestial subject matter, yet her controlled brushstrokes are a contrast to the mysterious chaos of space. Much of her work takes on a geometric quality, by and large structured, but with frequent splashes of intuitive expressionism. The color divisions are reminiscent of a map in the way she partitions space into territories of varying hues, although in Parsons’ paintings, the boundaries are blurred and determined by the artist’s sense of time, position, and the elements of dimensionality. Among other components, Parsons’ work is fundamentally about “the way man defines himself in space and time.” Her canvases are full of light and dark, small and large, and contrasting features of that which is carefully measured and the spontaneous aspects of painting that just happen. It is the structure, however, where Parsons places her focus. “Once you’ve got your structure, you begin to build the essentials, leaving out details. It’s the questions you ask before you start that make the painting’s value.” Both intuitive and formal, Parsons’ paintings are beautiful to look at and deeply thought-provoking.