In his largest drawing of this period, Dimensions (c. 1945–1946, Museum of Modern Art, New York),[6] disparate figures and body parts, interior furnishings, vegetation, and geometric shapes pulsate through a dense three-dimensional space where the spatial trickery evokes that of M. C. Escher.
When exhibited in 2008, the New York Times wrote of Dimensions that "A pencil drawing by Gray Foy, a little-known American artist born in 1923, is ... a scrambled, congested, Dalí-like composition of body parts, still-life, architecture, and landscape made with unbelievable refinement and microscopic detailing.
The pictures also reflect an affinity with the work of American Realists such as Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry, whose tropes include the overlapping vignettes of mural painting, often populated by figures whose bodies are contoured or distorted to mimic their immediate setting.
"[8] A realist direction was fostered when his wartime employment ended and he moved back to Dallas to renew his art studies at Southern Methodist with his teachers Jerry Bywaters and Otis Dozier, both referred to as Lone Star Regionalists.
"[14] But by the time of his first one-person exhibition at Durlacher's in April 1951, Foy had nearly abandoned Surrealist imagery and began concentrating instead on the depiction of botanical organisms undergoing transitional states.
The New York Times critic Stuart Preston wrote: "Foy's pencil and brush spin out a tissue of delicacy and transparency, light enough to seem to have settled on the paper like frost, strong enough to have netted in its gossamer texture enough visual data about the plant forms to astound a botanist.
In one group of works, Foy developed an additional illustrative mechanism, preparing the drawing paper with a teeming texture, introducing earthy tones and chlorophyll-like colorations.
In his book The Language of Ornament, art historian James Trilling described the effect: "Gray Foy’s drawing evokes the richness of a living coral reef, or the cheerfully haunted rocks that provide a background to some of the finest Persian miniatures.
"[17] After receiving a career-affirming John Simon Guggenheim grant in 1961,[18] Foy concentrated on his largest drawing, The Third Kingdom (1961–62), in which monochromatic greenish-umber tones convey the pro-longed activity of organic upheaval.
Curator Stephen C. Wicks explained: "The rich array of textures serves as a seductive skin beneath which the artist’s plant forms appear to germinate, writhe, and wither.