Artistic Expressions

After years of collecting art, Caleigh Parsons finds her own artistic voice

Caleigh Parsons likens her art to her own life — layers of texture, chaotic, unpredictable and colorful.

The Dothan resident spent years supporting artists and collecting works that moved her. Parsons even tried her hand at painting over the course of her life, but she never felt her work was good enough. She resigned herself to being a lover of other people’s art.

“I’m an art lover, I’m not an artist — that was my tagline,” she says.

It took a pandemic for Parsons to finally discover her own artistic style.

Now her art hangs in galleries, but it’s also on jackets, bags, blankets, pants, tops, jumpsuits, dresses and caftans.

The untrained artist

Parsons had a career as a recruiter for the banking industry, part of a small firm in Dothan.

After COVID-19 shut everything down in early 2020, Parsons created The Untrained Edit, an online gallery for artists to show and sell their work. That evolved into a shared studio and gallery where artists could work, display their art and host classes.

“It was really the most brilliant accident of my life,” Parsons says. “I surrounded myself with these women who were artists. I put myself in a studio and was able to watch them.”

She learned it wasn’t always about the end product, but the discoveries made along the way.

“I spent several months just watching these brilliant women in their space doing their thing and how long it would take or what their process looked like, or how they would work on something and leave it for a long time and come back to it,” Parsons says. “I watched how they would get inspired by each other, and it was just like it clicked.”

So, at 45 years old, she started painting again.

The art she creates is abstract with bright, sometimes whimsical designs. Acrylics, oil pastels, textured paper and even modeling paste add to the layers on her canvases. Sometimes she mounts her pieces in vintage frames, also covered in layers of paint.

The Untrained Edit continued to grow with more artists joining the collective.

Eventually, it got too big for Parsons to manage. She still had a full-time career and a family, including twin sons in high school. Plus, she now wanted to focus on her own art. After she and her husband, Scott, talked about it, Parsons decided to close The Untrained Edit in spring 2024.

She has no regrets. She feels The Untrained Edit created momentum for local artists. A regular art crawl, the nonprofit Art in Public Places and the Loop Music and Art Festival all came out of The Untrained Edit.

Parsons and the core group of artists originally involved in The Untrained Edit still work together at Bells Gallery, a contemporary art gallery operated by Art in Public Places founder Holly Roberts Myers next door to where The Untrained Edit was located at Cherokee and Main streets.

“I think The Untrained Edit did exactly what it needed to do,” Parsons says. “When I first started it, I did not even know that it was going to go in that direction. I didn’t know I was going to be here, I didn’t know I would be painting myself.”

A different path

These days, Parsons is a full-time artist, leaving her recruiting career more than a year ago. She travels a fine arts circuit and accepts commissions. Her art has appeared in galleries in Alabama and Mississippi and was recently selected for a juried art show at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts. Her pieces hang in local businesses like Downtown Books and Southern Institute of Plastic Surgery. She has even printed her work on leather bags, blankets and bandannas to give as gifts around the holidays.

By happenstance, Parsons’ work came to the attention of an independent fashion designer in New York City.

During a vacation in New York, Parsons and a friend visited a boutique called Meg. While Parsons was in a dressing room, her friend was approached by a salesperson who loved the friend’s crossbody bag, which featured Parsons’ artwork. When the salesperson found out the artist was in the dressing room, she called the boutique’s owner, a designer named Meghan Kinney.

Turns out, Kinney collaborates with artists, using images from their work on fabric that she then fashions into clothing she sells at her boutiques in Brooklyn, Manhattan and Toronto.

Kinney designed pants, a top, a jumpsuit and even a dress for her spring and summer 2026 line with images of Parsons’ art. Kinney plans to use another piece of Parsons’ art on more fabric.

Parsons is thankful for the current art journey she is on, although at times it feels surreal.

“When you open your hands and say, ‘I’m ready and I’m trusting where this is supposed to go,’ you better be ready,” she says.

Visit caleighparsonsart.com or Caleigh Parsons Art on Instagram to see more of her work.