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if you stain, it spreads and when you put the asking 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 boy, density.  (Jacob Kainen Interiw with Judith Wilson, WDC, July 1, 1978)

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.... (p.20)

In the early 1960s, Thomas prepared watercolors as studies for her larger paintings, "developing a strategy -- many many studies - and she'd have the design in her mind when she painted it." (Kainen JW intv) The watercolors, generally a little darker than her paintings on canvas, are jewels in and of themselves. For example, Macy's Parade, Untitled (both 1960) and Spring Fantasy, 1963, are spontaneous, fresh compositions with an economy and airiness of subtle, discernible, yet 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 

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