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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....

Two years later, Thomas had resolved some stylistic ambiguities with modernism but passages of academicism, such as modeling, shading and spatial depth, remain evident as seem in Still Life with Chrysanthemums, 1954. The following year, the battle between representation and abstraction in Study of A Young Girl, ca. 1955, continues. The figure becomes a prop in Thomas's exploration with abstraction, heightened by the fusion of the background treatment with the figural element. Developed with thick, broad brush strokes of equal weight and intensity, the background and the figure are distinguished only by the juxtaposition of contrasting colors. Despite the Expressionist tenor articulated here, there is a stillness that characterizes the figure, rendering it static rather than animated or actively engaged. Although the palette is somber and dark, ranging from earth tones to dissonant shades of turquoise and gray, Study of A Young Girl signals the colorist Thomas will become in a few short years.

Yellow and Blue, 1957, is actually vivid yellow, somber blue, sizzling red, bold black, and cool pink in a Clyfford Still-like manner, a well not Abstract Expressionist in New York. The broad field of red is penetrated and punctuated by the alternate colors in the composition. Totally abstracted, Thomas presents color as pure optical sensation, richly saturated in an open field; no traces of a 

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