[3] After finishing his education, he traveled intermittently from Georgia to Chicago, Boston, New York, and finally Philadelphia, working odd jobs - experiences that provided him with subject matter to later paint.

[5] At the Fine Print Workshop of Philadelphia, Thrash, along with Michael J. Gallagher and Hugh Mesibov, began experimenting and co-inventing the process of carborundum mezzotint, a printmaking technique.

[1] Carborundum printmaking uses a carbon-based abrasive to burnish copper plates creating an image that can produce a print in tones ranging from pale gray to deep black.

By 1940, Thrash, Gallagher, and Mesibov all began to gain attention in local circles for their carborundum prints, although the role that each artist played in the development of the process was left unclear.

[8] Alain LeRoy Locke (1885–1954) was an intellectual, professor and author who espoused that African Americans, specifically artists, to capture the personality, lives, and essence of their people in The New Negro.

Close to one another, staring collectively outward at the Southern landscape, they, and their laudable priorities of cleanliness and family, are made the bright focal point in the poor, unstable atmosphere.

Such inner warmth is seemingly incompatible with the family's crooked and disheveled surroundings, and their fuzzy appearance with a lack of facial detail makes the scene into a general archetype for rural southern blacks living conditions and qualities.

Thrash was referencing an experience common to thousands of black families in rural occupations at the turn of the 20th century, often forced into slavery-like tenant farming as their only means of livelihood in the racist South.

Through softer tempera washes like A New Day, he literally and figuratively paints a picture of a black family transitioning from the South to the North during the Great Migration, making a hopeful, daring leap to attempt to be equal members of the society that has historically oppressed them.

On the left side of the canvas lie muddled farm houses and plow handles, embodiments of their rural life of tedious hard labor behind them, fading to gray.

Even the child, clutched securely in the arm of the mother figure against her breast is not only serenely grinning, but calm enough to appear to gently doze, confident in that the journey ahead will result positively, poses no threat.

The exposed arm of the woman is notable as well, being unusually thick and muscular, along with the general proportions of the kneeling father, who position on the ground appears not pleading but rather in a slightly exhausted, but upright gratefulness for the promise ahead.

They are the quintessence of the New Negro, in that they are not only journeying forward to seize previously unobtainable opportunities that will enhance their lives, but the manner with which they hold themselves provokes a certain level of warranted respect for their humanity, from the viewer.

Art historian Richard Powell describes it best, stating that Life's “non-racial genre scene, soft sells that Black children, too, experience the thrills and tender moments of youth.

These underlying themes of commonalities and unity contribute to an aesthetic of being part of a larger system as opposed to being separate from it.”[10] Thrash's conscious decision to not only give specific attention to a black subject through a portrait, but to place the child as engaging in an intellectual pursuit that crosses racial borders enforces a positive view of African Americans as intelligent, integral members of society akin to whites.

The room in which the girl sits is dark and shadowy, however, the light source shines directly upon her face and lap, emphasizing her beautifully carved young features engrossed in the reading material.

Though muscular, shapely, and attractive, she feels the need to engage in the laborious task of making her tightly coiled hair straight in order to prepare for the night in the public sphere.

To Locke and Thrash, this was not viewed as positive for African Americans considering that it the connotation of such an act of conforming to the aesthetic norms of white society puts the natural condition of blacks in a categorization of less than optimal, or ugly.

Thrash addressed the issue by creating portraits of African-American subjects and ideal heads using his carborundum mezzotint method that defined typically black facial features in a more realistic manner.