While Arshile Gorky is considered to be one of the founding fathers of Abstract Expressionism and a Surrealist, he was also one of the first painters of the New York School who used the technique of 'staining'. Gorky created broad fields of vivid, open, unbroken color that he used in his many of his paintings as "grounds." In Gorky's most effective and accomplished paintings between the years 1941 and 1948, he consistently used intense stained fields of color, often letting the paint run and drip, under and around his familiar lexicon of organic and biomorphic shapes and delicate lines. Another abstract expressionist whose works in the 1940s call to mind the stain paintings of the 1960s and the 1970s is James Brooks. Brooks frequently used stain as a technique in his paintings from the late 1940s. Brooks began diluting his oil paint in order to have fluid colors with which to pour and drip and stain into the mostly raw canvas that he used. These works often combined calligraphy and abstract shapes. During the final three decades of his career, Sam Francis' style of large-scale bright Abstract expressionism was closely associated with Color Field painting. His paintings straddled both camps within the Abstract Expressionist rubric, action painting and Color Field painting.