In the early 1940s Seligmann frequently painted on the reverse side of glass, a folk art he learned as a young man in Switzerland. The technique requires that the artist paint in reverse; instead of working from general forms to specific details, the artist begins with foremost elements in an image, filling in the larger shapes behind. No doubt reflecting his anxious mood during the early war years, Seligmann favored dark grounds. However, to paint a dark background on glass would rob the frontal detail of its translucence. It is believed he smoked the glass from behind, a process perhaps inspired by the romage technique which Wolfgang Paalen devised in the late 1930s, to achieve the luminous darkness which permeates these compositions.