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          if you stain, it spreads and when you put the masking tape you
          control it but that was too mechanical for her because she was really
          an expressionist painter when she put the paint on... The body of
          Alma's work has density, body.  It's very different from the Color
          Field.  That's a very important thing, because the Color Field
          painters gain something by staining but they sacrifice something very
          important, and that is body.  She didn't sacrifice body, density.57

     Thomas assimilated the influences and ideas of these and other artists and she continued to explore abstract themes in her work.  Merry A. Foresta of the National Museum of American Art, curator of the retrospective of the artist's work three years after her death concluded, during this transition, that:

          In her dark, semi-abstract oil painting of the late 1950s and early
          1960s the artist struggled to resolve a mode of expression begun in
          her earlier work... Deep in tone - blues and browns predominate, 
          with only occasional touches of brighter colors - the unspecified
          shapes suggest organic forms.  This rough and dense treatment
          evokes a troubled, almost tragic mood...58

     In the early 1960s, Thomas prepared her watercolors as studies for the larger paintings, "developing a strategy -- with many many studies - and she'd have the design in her mind when she painted it."50 The watercolors, generally a little darker than her paintings on canvas, are jewels in and of themselves.  For example, Macy's Parade, and Untitled (both 1960) and Spring Fantasy, 1963, are spontaneous, fresh compositions with an economy and airiness of subtle, discernible, but diffused shapes: skyscrapers in a city landscape form the background as schematized equestrian figures lead us in the foreground of Macy's Parade.  Untitled celebrates the grandeur of the flower garden with undulating

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