Nay declared that "to paint is to form a picture from color."

Thus it became necessary, if he was to avert the
danger of formless expressionism, to discipline the
Protean nature of colour and its myriad associations
by means of methodical arrangement. In Nay's early
pictures we still see certain evocations of lyrical
or dramatic experiences, a certain responsiveness to
the appeals of the myth that may arise from brilliant
colour and formal emblems. But the spatial movement
of the colour is already securely tied to the surface
and its deployment articulated by a system of moving
curves and fixed points of support. (W. Haftmann,
Painting in the Twentieth Century, New York, 1965,
p. 334)

By 1956 Nay simplified his pictorial forms to a series of interlocking color-discs, and by the end of the decade he eliminated all associative or psychological elements from his paintings.