Still Life with Pinks; but just barely.  What really gets your attention is the cacophony of colors and patterns arranged so that the distinction between the figure and the ground becomes nil.  Blaine’s wildly textured paint and mix of colors consumes the space to where subject matter is incidental - a truly abstract concept.  While some of her work is more conventionally figurative I think for her, that age old battle between abstraction and representation eventually no longer mattered.

Nell Blaine, Still Life with Pinks, 1958, oil on paper mounted on board, 24 x 19 in

Based on the evidence of this show the greatest change to her work is really how she began to  sling paint around.  This was perhaps the strongest influence of that trip to Europe.  Some

Nell Blaine, White figure in Blue, 1946, oil on board, 28.5 x 19.75 in

of the old masters she had to have been looking at were the impressionists along with Cezanne; but most of all, Van Gogh. A possible influence is another Dutch-born painter closer to home and her age: de Kooning.  For the abstract work, the switch to a looser paint handling results in more ambiguous spatial relationships between all the forms while also heating up the emotional aspect.  By comparison the paintings from the 40s are more cerebral or at the very least more restrained.  In the 50s Nell Blaine broke the confines of pure abstraction and more fully liberated her emotional self expression.

Nell Blaine, Palatine Ruins, 1953, oil on canvas, 36.5 x 54.5 in