Gottlieb's Imaginery Landscapes (1950-1957) evolved from the more rigid and surrealistic Pictographs of the previous ten years. The grid of the Pictogrpah became no longer a formal device, but erupted into an explosion of black lines densley worked in to the "ground" of the landscape above which floated circular forms. Robert Doty reports Gottlieb saying: "I started making a Grid, then I decided I didn't want it and I divided the painting into two parts. I wanted a disparate image." (See R. Doty, Adolph Gottlieb, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 1968, p. 22) The disparity between the thickly painted, dark earth and the white light of the sky with its two or three suns intrigued Gottlieb. The series inevitably led to the Bursts where only one sun floats above a simple mass of black. Until his death, Gottlieb concentrated on the landscape format but only in the richly painted Imaginery Landscpaes, of which Cold Spot #2 is a superb example, does he achieve such a dramatic dicotomy of light and dark, space and mass, sky and earth.