[2][3][4] He often employs energetic, gestural line, dense patterns of accumulated shapes, and fluid movement between figuration and abstraction, using strategies of concealment and revelation to create a sense of meaning that is both playful and elusive.

[5][6][7] His work is also unified by "a circulating library" of motifs and organizing structures, such as geographic and urban mapping, abstracted natural and industrial forms, and language systems.

[8][7] He built his reputation with extended road trips, meeting individually with museum curators and gallery owners throughout the Midwest, and cultivating collectors through small showings in people's homes in places as far-flung as Omaha, Minneapolis, Erie, and Boston.

He also earned attention from critics such as New Art Examiner co-founder Jane Addams Allen[4] and the Chicago Sun Times’ Harold Haydon,[23] and shows at universities and museums across the Midwest.

[1][8] With a "restless creative energy," he freely explored media—drawing, printmaking, painting, and more recently, sculpture, ceramics and tapestry—creating a highly diverse body of work consistent in its formal convictions and its humanistic preoccupations with humanity's relationship to nature (including its own), the organization of civilization, and the structures of visual communication and language.

[2][1] In enigmatic works as large as four by eight feet, a restless, wiry contour line created a dynamic, shifting focus from macrocosm to microcosm, pattern to image, and abstraction to figuration, as animals, people, plants and structures emerged and de-materialized into an edge-to-edge, interlocking tapestry of organic and geometric shapes.

[29][19] Critics like Jane Addams Allen and Derek Guthrie saw in the maze of observation, incident and detail multiple levels of perception: a sense of nature "synonymous with rhythms of life"; a visualization of civilization reflecting Himmelfarb's urban planning studies; and a wry humor springing from juxtapositions of gesture, proportion and form.

"[32] In these works, he created compositions resembling sacred scrolls, tablets, fragments of temple facades and everyday documents, fashioned from private, invented languages of pictograms, hieroglyphs and characters derived from Neolithic and religious symbols, ancient earth drawings, Asian and Arabic alphabets, and seal scripts that imply coherent statements, yet remain mysterious.

[27][28][9] Formally, the series relate back to Himmelfarb's early drawings in the tension between overall image and pattern, manipulation of positive and negative space, and exploration of visual structures—here, of language rather than social order.

Critic John Brunetti described them as "evocative gestalts of language, image, and thought," combining "unusual beauty" and "rigorous discipline," to suggest the physical and spiritual signatures left by past civilizations or the richness of life.

It incorporated abstracted elements inspired by the city's rhythm, density and industrial forms—bridges, ladders, ironworks, chimneys, cranes, scrap yards, often drawn as lattice-screens over modeled grounds—and passageways such as rivers, roads, maps and transportation lines.

[36] Critics typically noted the paintings’ exuberance, luminous color and frenzied rhythm, comparing them variously, to improvisational jazz, stained glass, mythical city plans, or tapestries depicting a journey.

[19][38] Completed in the days after the September 11th attacks, the work drew equal attention from viewers both for Himmelfarb's high-pressure performance and for its emotionally charged color and dynamism on an epic scale.

[41][42] A new series was born which would expand to include drawings (many on old library catalogue cards), prints, and sculpture employing ceramics, wood, cast iron, steel, and eventually, 25-foot, drivable assemblages incorporating actual trucks, that critics have described collectively as whimsical, formally inventive.

[40][8] In 2008, he made a huge leap, acquiring a 1946 International KB-1 pickup truck, along with a host of found objects—steel barrels, equipment, tools, pipes—that he welded together and painted stop-sign red to create the assemblage, Conversion.