With its thin, delicate tracery of black threading throughout the strokes of whites and filaments of shifting color
forms, Number 15 is a fitting culmination of Tomlin's career.By inclination a superb colorist, Tomlin reduced his palette from 1945 to 1947, and focused first on the painterly mark, adapting a
calligraphic technique
within a vaguely Cubist structure of horizontals and verticals.
The diversity of the 1980s can be seen in Dan Christensen's Tuscarora (1980), which belongs to the vibrant and poetic paintings in which the artist furthered his use of experimental methods to include staining on unstretched canvases and
calligraphic «drawing» using sticks, brushes, and turkey basters, Friedel Dzubas's Barrier (1983), demonstrating the lyrical and contemplative style of this artist who studied with Paul Klee, and Stanley Boxer's Speckledchant (1988), a work in mixed media that evokes baroque opulence in the way that explosive
forms seem compressed
within the confines of the canvas.