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the artists possibilities of American Negro subject matter. It was also Grosz who led me to study composition, through a the analysis of Brueghel and the great Dutch masters and who in the process of refining my draftsmanship initiated me into the magic world of Ingres, Durer, Holbein and Poussain.

I had decided that I wanted to make painting, not mathematics, my lifes work, but it was not until several years after leaving the League that I managed to do a group of paintings with and stylists continuity. The subject matter of almost al of these paintings was drawn from Negro life. This is also true of my painting now, but at that time my emphasis was more on the rural South, than the urban north. Everything that I have done since has been in effect an extension of the experiments with flat painting, shallow space, Byzantine stylization and African design, which I began at that time.

All of my first paintings were down in tempera. I completed about 20 before going into the service in 1942. When I returned to civilian life in 1945, I began a series of watercolors based on such themes as The Passion of Christ, The Bullring and The Illiad. My temperas had been ? in closed forms and the coloring was subdued, mostly earthy browns, blues and greens. When I started working with watercolor, however, I found myself using bright color patterns and bold, black lines to delineate semi-abstract shapes. I never worked long on a painting in this method, or made many corrections. I had not yet learned that modern painting progresses through cumulative destructions and new beginnings.