Throughout her career, Marcelle Ferron’s painting was defined by an expressive, exuberant approach to colour and gesture. After meeting Paul-Émile Borduas in 1946, she quickly became a powerful voice in the emerging language of Québécois painterly abstraction. Between 1953 and 1966, Ferron swapped Montreal for Paris, where she rapidly developed her technique and practice. She began to eschew the use of brushes in favour of palette knives. These would frequently be impressive in their own right - Ferron employed a metalsmith to custom build larger-than-normal tools in a variety of widths and lengths, up to a metre long. She also employed what she called “squeegees,” knives with a large blade fixed at a right angle to the handle, which she would use for what she termed “great moments” or “rakings.” She would use these knives and spatulas to create ever larger and more expressive painterly gestures, pulling vibrant hues through white backgrounds to create rich, riotous fields of colour.

As she was limited in resources while in Montreal in the 1940s, the works that Ferron produced were by necessity modest in size, characterized by dense tessellations and subdued earth tones. In Paris, however, Ferron’s canvases were increasingly large, chromatic and dramatic, sometimes reaching monumental scale. Her paintings moved away from the compactness of her earlier works and employed a more vibrant, expressive use of colour—at least partially as a response to a European market that demanded it—and, courtesy of a generous patron, she was able to use more expensive pigments. She would grind and mix these pigments herself, binding them with linseed and poppy-seed oils; the latter of these is lighter-coloured and yellows less with age, and is a medium particularly suited for the mixing of whites. Ferron was especially resolute in her use of white in particular, and would frequently return to paintings as they aged (so long as they were still in her possession) in order to re-apply fresh paint over white areas that had become dirtied or yellowed. This ensured that her paintings would continually be revitalized, dynamically refreshed and improved upon, even after the final formal arrangement was broadly settled.  The relentless primacy of white demonstrates its importance in her compositions, functioning as both background and structure for the more chromatic pigments.