Opus #2

Eunice Jensen Parsons

In 1954’s “Opus #2,” the intersection of Parsons’ painterly tone and Cubist tension are found in her portrayal of orchestral musicians. It is also a clear precursor to her late-career preferred medium, collage, with its layered blocks of light and shadow, line and texture.

Eunice Lulu (Jensen) Parsons was born August 4, 1916 in Loma, Colorado. Her family lived briefly in Montana, but when she was age four, her family moved to Chicago, Illinois. In 1934 and 1935, she attended childrens art classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She married Allen Herbert Jensen in 1936 and moved to Portland, Oregon, raising three children there. From 1950 to 1954, she studied at the Portland Museum Art School. In 1957 she took a bus to the East Coast to study abstract expressionism. Her sketchbooks from that trip demonstrate her early inclinations in "color, line, and shading, all developing into a unique and distinctive style".

Parsons joined the faculty of the Portland Museum Art School as a painting instructor, where she was known as a "blunt but brilliant" teacher. She also taught printmaking and composition between 1957 and 1979. Her career has also included teaching classes at Portland State University.

Parsons was a co-founder of the 12x16gallery in southeast Portland, a cooperative which exhibited artists' work between 2006 and 2017. She is still living and working in Portland, Oregon. Through the years she has been a teacher, a painter, a printmaker and a tilemaker, but since the early 1970s Eunice has worked in the medium for which she is best known - collage. Parsons exhibited as recently as 2017 in her hometown of Portland.