Dorothy Hood balances the
drama of the red wash that bisects this painting with a more nuanced treatment
of the gray areas. On the right margin, in particular, she added an opaque band
of gray to subtly define the edge of the composition. This may have been in
response to advice she received from the art critic Clement Greenberg, who
wrote to her in 1977: “the [paintings] rely too much on hard contour lines.” In
another letter he suggested, “You might, just for fun, fool around some with the
way you apply paint.”