Pollock was influenced by European Modernists, including Picasso and the Surrealists, and by Native American sand painting and the Mexican mural movement. He went on to create Action Painting, his unique technique for freely manipulating the pours of his pigments to bury his canvas in them, and became a standard-bearer of Expressionism. He created this work in a period when he moved away from that style to experiment with painting using black lines; a variety of lines emerge amid tension with the reserved space. That he applied colors, unusually in this period, to the striking spindle shapes suggests his fastidiousness about form.