raising funds from collectors and donors in New York and making a name for themselves through shared and solo exhibitions. At this time, Blaine was working alongside Ida Fischer, Judith Rothschild, and other Abstract Expressionist artists under 25 years of age. Blaine briefly lived and worked in Paris around 1950 with Larry Rivers, traveling across Europe and exhibiting with the American Abstract Artists group in France, Denmark, and Italy. This experience inspired her to try traditional 19th-century European painting. She showed at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery starting in 1953. During the mid-1950s, she refined her increasingly painterly and colorful style. She worked directly from nature, or still life, particularly focusing on the forms and hues of flowers. Also during this time, Blaine was prominent among a prestigious circle of New York artists and poets which included John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Willem de Kooning, Kenneth Koch, Lee Krasner, Jane Freilicher, Leland Bell, Louisa Matthiasdottir, Robert De Niro Sr., and Rudy Burckhardt. In 1955, she designed the original logo of column heads and layout for the weekly New York newspaper The Village Voice. In 1959, Blaine spent several months traveling and painting in Greece before contracting bulbospinal, or paralytic, polio while visiting Mykonos Island. After eight months in a New York hospital, she was told she would never paint again. Though she used a wheelchair the rest of her life, by 1960 intensive physical therapy had rehabilitated the use of her hands. From then on, she would use her left hand to paint with oils, and her right hand to sketch and work on watercolors. Work Blaine resisted classifying her work, which explored color and the interplay of light and shade. The subject matter was primarily landscapes of the Hudson River made from her apartment window, vases of flowers, still lifes, home interiors, or her garden at Gloucester, Massachusetts. She once said, "The artist needs a permissive atmosphere. I am not involved in impressionism, and I have turned from my former total abstract presentation. Mine are action paintings. I want to be surprised by what I am doing. An artist must be his own leader, no matter what direction he takes." By the 1950s, Blaine's work had reached considerable acclaim in New York City. Art critic Clement Greenberg spoke highly of her work, describing Blaine's Great White Creature as “best in the show” at the annual exhibition of the American Abstract