John Marin is considered one of the outstanding watercolorists of the twentieth century. Many of his compositions, such as Adirondacks I, include mountains. These typically exude the Fauve-like lyricism of Henri Matisse while creating delicate atmospheric effects similar to James McNeill Whistler's. The Armory Show in 1913 made a profound impact upon Marin's outlook and style. In Europe, he had failed to come into contact with avant-garde movements and artists, being drawn primarily to Whistler's work, but after the exposure and serious attention abstraction received at the Armory Show, Marin began to develop a much more distinctive and abstract approach to his two favorite subjects-city life in New York and scenes of the Maine coast. Marin was nearly thirty, working as an architectural draughtsman, before he decided to attend Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and then the Art Students' League. Traveling to Europe in 1905, Marin stayed for five years, mainly in Paris, to pursue additional studies. While in Paris, he was discovered by the American photographer Edward Steichen, who in turn, introduced him to Alfred Stieglitz. Marin exhibited at Stieglitz's New York gallery, "291" alongside Max Weber, Arthur Dove, and Georgia O'Keeffe. Stieglitz continued to support Marin's artistic endeavors, and the two formed a life-long friendship

This series was among Motherwell's first efforts at silkscreen. The original studies for the suite came from ten large automatic brush drawings using ink on paper. The studies were then overpainted with acrylic and masked with white paper to achieve more of the effects of silhouettes. Motherwell was intrigued with the density of black forms against a light background. He had a postcard of the megalithic stones at Stonehenge silhouetted against a fading sky in his Greenwich, Connecticut studio. Motherwell studied at Stanford, Harvard, Columbia, and Grenoble, and also later in Paris. He returned to America in 1940 and resided in New York. As an Abstract Expressionist painter and printmaker, he pursued both divisions of the New York School-action and color field painting. African Suite combines the spontaneity of action painting with a sense of control defined by the strong, structural plane of color. Motherwell was highly prolific as an artist, teacher, writer, and editor. He taught at Black Mountain College and Columbia University, wrote many articles for art history periodicals, and is credited with setting much of the intellectual tone of Abstract Expressionism.

Mamoud is interested in surrealism, the figure, and abstraction. These figures or a figure through time and space approach the edge of the canvas and, in the left foreground, a flattened space resembling a trap-door. The artist lives in DeKalb, Illinois and is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Northern Illinois University.