Painter Friedel Dzubas (1915-1994) was considered a pioneer of the stain painting technique along with artists like Helen Frankenthaler (Fig. 1). His earliest works evoked Paul Klee and William Baziotes, but he soon moved towards working exclusively in colorful stain painting, scrubbing thick layers of color into large, unprimed canvases.1 Stain Painting is a method that allows the oil or acrylic paint to seep into the fiber of an unprimed canvas. The staining process created fields of dense color and other areas where the color seemed almost translucent.

Figure 1, Helen Frankenthaler, Mountains and Sea, 1952, oil on canvas, 86 5/8’ x 117 ¼’. Collection of the artists, on extended loan to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.. © Helen Frankenthaler (1998).

For Dzubas, these paintings referenced natural phenomena, emotion, the painterly gesture, and the experience of color itself.
In the quest for labels to define Dzubas work, we could then say that he was an Abstract Expressionist, Color Field, Post Painterly, Modern, Post Modern, and Romantic painter. This definition can summarize all Dzubas’ production in over 40 years. But to me it is probably more interesting to investigate how he was interpreting the paint as a medium of his production to better understand his career as a painter.
It should not come as a surprise that Friedel Dzubas did not obtain the same space and attention as other artists like Pollock, or Frankenthaler. Still, he was considered an insider in the Greenbergian camp, intimately connected to Greenberg and many celebrated artists of the day, and someone who enjoyed, though certainly not to the same degree, the privileges of this association in the form of a regular exhibitions at the top galleries, inclusion in shows at major museums, and consistent attention to the art press. 
In his essay “Language Barriers, Critical and Painterly Semantics and the Work of Friedel Dzubas”, Timothy Mc Elreavy will say that regardless his affiliation or affinities, Dzubas’ work is a critical demonstration of how the various operation of critical systems, Greenberg’s in particular, can construct the condition for producing and viewing art, as well as how these systems might be used to reassert an identity and purpose for painting.2
Dzubas (Fig. 2) is often identified by his ties to the New York School of Abstract Expressionists. He was associated with Jackson Pollock in East Hampton and from 1952 to 1953 shared a studio with Helen Frankenthaler. While his earlier works bear the hallmarks of the New York School, by the 1960s the artist had begun to empty and simplify his canvases. It was during the 1960s that the artist secured his reputation as a painter of great merit, and a mainstay of color field painting. In 1964 the artist was included in the seminal exhibition Post Painterly Abstraction, curated by Greenberg at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Karen Wilkin describes the canvasses from this time as “typical of the fresh, lucid color abstraction of those years.”3
As the artist continued to empty and simplify his picture plane his treatment of movement shifted from one of illustration to suggestion. Instead, his luminous canvasses are scattered with exuberant color, free from reference. Determined to “let color speak as directly as possible”4 the artist began to explore a combination of minimal forms, awash in negative space. By the 1970s these forms appear as if caught in arrested motion, a still frame of dramatic color.
What distinguishes Dzubas from other stain fielders, like Frankenthaler and colorist Morris Louis, at first is a preoccupation with linear gestures. Curvilinear strokes and blots, squiggles, X- and Z-shapes and other flourishes of the brush lent a sense of calligraphy to the works. With black as a backdrop, muted yellows, pale blues, pinks and oranges take on an incandescent quality.5
Another big difference with Helen Frankenthaler was that, as Dzubas himself said during an interview with Charles Millard, he always used brushes to paint since he didn’t really see any advantage of unorthodox tools.6 That means that he was not pouring his paint from cans, like Helen Frankenthaler. On the same subject, Dzubas asserts:
I always primed my canvases. The only time I stained was when I was still using oil on a bed sheets. I practically soaked the bed sheet in turpentine and then stained with cheap house paint into the soaked surface. Just recently instead of priming the canvas so it will hold the turpentine while I work, it’s primed so meagerly that the medium immediately sucks in and you can’t dance around. Whatever you put down is not open to manipulation, you’re stuck with it.7

Why he was labeled a stain painter seems confusing, His techniques and style,  preclude characterization intot a single painting style. Kenworth Moffett who wrote:
Still another artistic affinity present in these pictures is that with a German romantic painting, specifically Der Blaue Reiter, Dzubas’ first influence: Some of Dzubas’ earlier pictures are dark, moody landscapes and abstractions related to Klee and Feiniger. The somber, heavy, smoldering warmth and the sense of some grand cosmic event present in his late paintings are reminiscent of the world of northern romanticism and expressionism.8

What emerges from this criticism more broadly is a vision of Dzubas as an artist whose true identity comes not from his close affiliation with Frankenthaler, but from his German forefathers.9 So even if he stained, when he stained, Dzubas did so with the coloristic, spatial, and intellect sense and sensibility of a male artist, steeped in the tradition of German Expressionism or Romanticism.