Relationship between avant-garde art and American pop culture brush strokes and in techniques partially dictated by chance, such as dripping or spilling the paint directly onto the canvas. Examples of this include Jackson Pollock dripping commercial paints on raw canvas to build up complex and tangled skeins of paint into exciting and suggestive linear patterns and Willem de Kooning used extremely vigorous and expressive brush strokes to build up richly colored and textured images. The second category of Abstract Expressionism is represented by a variety of styles ranging from Color field, to Lyrical abstraction; delicate imagery and fluid shapes and fields of color included in works by Clyfford
The Ghost of a Flea the work is in relatively poor condition, partly due to the technique employed by Blake. Areas of the surface have cracked and dulled with age. Although Blake was singular in his ability to directly transcribe visions onto canvas or paper, a number of visual and literary sources can be detected in this work. The art historian Hope Werness suggested that "The Flea" may be inspired by a 1665 work by early microscopist Robert Hooke (1635–1703), whose "Micrographia" includes a drawing of a flea microscopically observed. Comparisons have been made to Henry Fuseli's monstrous imps, while the image of the flea