[1] Stevens was featured in several exhibitions at the New Gallery on 30th Street, which displayed an active interest in the more contemporary art movements under the guidance of its owner, Mary Beacon Ford.

[11] The proliferation of modernist issues, occurred coincidentally with Stevens moving away from studio-oriented easel painting and toward the use of more versatile materials and gestural techniques.

[11] Stevens developed formulas for a fixative and binder, and a whole sequence of emulsions, from tempera with egg and oil to wax, which made his pastel pigments colorfast and virtually unsmudgeable.

But perhaps his most interesting technical innovation was to allow random strokes and blots of color to float onto and penetrate a prepared wet paper, thus defining of themselves the starting point for the emergence of the final image—this independently of the experiments with accident and chance of the Dada and Surrealist painters[1] His style had become characterized by the direct, gestural application of lines and tones, which were energized by clusters of flickering color notations.

[12] As an artist, Stevens' interest in nature as subject matter was inspired by his well-documented enthusiasm for the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman.

[2] During a trip to Washington, D.C. in the early 1900s, Stevens discovered an exhibition of Chinese paintings on silk from the Song (Sung) dynasty at the Freer Gallery.

Regarding the bold black and white linearity, rendered with authority on such a tentative, soft ground, Stevens remarked, "I could not look at Sung without realizing that it had the same kind of philosophy that I had discovered in Whitman.

"[17] Stevens clearly experienced in the Sung aspect of oriental art that which the impressionists found in Japanese prints, an affirmation of the two-dimensionality of the picture plane.

[18] Art historian, Jessie Poesch wrote that, "the selection by the Sung artists of the salient essences of forms, rather than the explicit and detailed delineation of them, obviously appealed to Stevens, as did, apparently, the sense of line on the surface, the network of lines and forms that suggested distance, rather than clearly defined sense of recession found in most western painting up to the early twentieth century.

What Stevens felt all of these diverse sources held in common was an attitude toward the world, summed up in Stevens' own statement, "The best thing a human can do in life is to get rid of his separateness or selfness and hand himself over to the nature of things—to this mysterious thing called the Universal Order, that any artist must sense...In human nature we are consciously trying to achieve an order.

[10] In a taped interview with Bernard Lemann, Stevens observed,"I do not draw a line between objective and non-objective (painting)...I am doing both and will continue to, so long as either seems vital to me.