1939 was a prolific year for Morris Blackburn, and he produced many prints and paintings with the task of reducing a still life or a figure to an abstracted form. Linear Pattern is among the largest and finest from that year, and we are thrilled also to have his Still Life Drawing, a wood engraving that shares the basic composition and shows changes in his thinking from watercolor to the wood block. Through the 1940s, Blackburn pushed his practice of reducing still life, landscape, and figures to blocks and shapes of color and line. Two examples, Abstraction (Ribbons) from 1945 and Abstraction c. 1949, show divergent approaches, the former sketch-like and embracing the white of the paper as integral to the composition, while the latter fits shapes together completely in a jigsaw puzzle fashion. A black circle is seemingly displaced, like a fish separated from its school.