Tin Lizzie Green

In this early painting Olitski used rollers (note the lines of accumulated paint and the "squeegeed" look of the bottom edge of the green) and perhaps some brushing to create layers of paint on the bare canvas, achieving different densities of paint and a range of color intensities. Olitski later commented: "That the paintings I was doing with rollers, such as Tin Lizzie Green, would lead to the spray gun couldn't have been foreseen by me. But they did. In the paint roller paintings there was a flow of one color merging into another color and so on. Then something happened which led me to a spray gun."The three colored balls and yellow stripe seem to have been made with something like a large crayon or oil stick, as recent scientific analysis indicates they contain wax and oil.