Clean, Opulent World

The walls of Manhattan's Ferargil Galleries vibrated last week with things more colorful, more detailed, more precise and concentrated than their images would normally form in the human eye. Painter Audrey Duller Parsons, 33, had divided her second one-man show about equally between animate and inanimate objects, all of which seemed to have struck her with equal intensity. There was a broken statue with a clutter of dead fish, an antique sugar shepherdess, a dead duck. All these were painted with luscious tactile surfaces, every detail as important as every other.

Notable among the figure paintings were Sunday Morning, a clean, well-fattened woman in an old-rose dressing gown sitting up to a cold fireplace (see cut) ; Fay Read ing, a blonde girl in a slip with High Tide of the Flesh on her knee; Sleeping Girl, another blonde superbly relaxed. Such fleshiness caused lusty Painter Reginald Marsh to exult in the exhibition's catalog: "Everywhere in these paintings is luxury. There is wit and a fine, fat magnificence. . . . Miss Duller has painted this clean, opulent world with a terrible power."

Audrey Buller Parsons is tall, hand some, brunette. Her husband is slender, grey-haired Lloyd Parsons, who paints landscapes. Both were born in Montreal, both paint in the same studio overlooking Manhattan's Washington Square.

Her father, the late great eye specialist Dr. Frank Buller, died when she was 3. She tried being a Montreal debutante, gave it up to study at Manhattan's Art Students' League. There Kenneth Hayes Miller told her she could improve her flat, overbright pictures by confining her palette to very few colors. To this good advice she credits the three-dimensional reality of her pictures. It takes her about two months for a painting.

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