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for ten years. Studying with Joe Summerford, Robert Gates, and Jacob Kainen, she leapt from representationalism, to cubism, to abstract expressionism, to the threshold of an abstraction style of colorful responses to nature. Fascinated by the environment and the graduate students in the studio, Thomas exclaimed:

The first time I was there, when they put a still life before me, I tried to paint it just as it was. When I looked in another room ... they did not copy anything that was set before them.42

Joe Summerford's Still Life Study, 1952, includes household objects such as a coffee pot, clock, bottles, and dried autumn leaves arranged on a table with fabric. Treated in a representational manner, they are the only identifiable objects in the composition. In the background, Thomas shifts to the slab-like planes of flat color which counteracts the sense of depth suggested by modeling of objects in the middle ground. To the right in an open door - taking the viewer into another room, but the door is framed by a cloth or a blanket which extends to the center of the composition, with the corner folded back to reveal an open window. There we see telephone poles, barren trees, and a cold autumnal sun. 

The geometric, cubist derived areas of color reveal Thomas's superficial acquaintance with the vocabulary but not the complete language of modernism. The dichotomy represented in Joe Summerford's Still Life Study may be understood from Thomas, who in an interview stated: 

I was doing representational painting. But I wasn't happy with that, ever. I watched other people painting abstractly, and I just kept thinking about it, turning it over and over in my mind....53

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