Self-taught painter Willy Tirr’s bold abstracts reflect his knowledge of German Expressionism combined with the influence of the American Abstract Expressionists and the St Ives movement. Fellow émigré Norbert Lyton called him 'a natural expressionist [...] developing an idiom in which pools of colour are constrasted with more incisive brush strokes [...]. As his command increased,' he also noted, Tirr looked for correspondingly larger supports 'on which to perform his gestural act', as demonstrated by the size of this canvas. Tirr had learned Japanese during internment and a kinship to Japanese calligraphy is also notable in works such as 'Acid Browns'.