The large scale of modern art, including the American Color Field painters, was a major break with the historical convention of easel painting. The scale of these works allows the viewer to actually "walk into" the painting since the edges disappear from the viewer's line of vision. This dramatically challenges naturalistic perspective. The spatial experience is completely altered and the canvas becomes a type of sky with a new kind of space spreading outward rather than inward.
This sense of spreading outward works equally well with the expansive, all-over paintings of Jackson Pollack as well the works of American Color Field Painters Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis and the centrally focused works of Kenneth Noland. With Frankenthaler and Louis, the works often seem to continue somewhere outside of the canvas.
For example, the cloud-like shapes that fill the canvas in Frankenthaler's Tutti Frutti feel as though they are part of a larger mass that exists outside of the range of the canvas itself. Louis's stripes in Unfolding Light likewise may stretch off into infinity at the bottom of the canvas. Noland's centralized works, such as the exemplary circle painting Song, begin in the center of the canvas and reverberate off into the unseen distance equally in all directions.