One of the prominent aspects of Rico Lebrun’s work that could differentiate him from other artists would be his process in approaching a drawing and choosing a subject, in which he blurs the line between the “alive” and the “inanimate”. In his statement in the book published by The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) on the Americans, 1942: 18 artists from 9 states exhibition he was a part of, he states how “drawing describes the content of the times in its resilience of contour” and “the contour is often the catalyst.” This is evident in most of his paintings, including Terrified Woman With Child, where emphasis is put on the strength of the silhouette and curvatures of the body– seen in the thick, black lines that would make up a complete figure. In the 1942 exhibition, he showcases his work from the years 1940-1941 where all of his subjects are human figures, from Seated Clown to Ortensia (1941). His work in the early 40s reflects his fascination with human anatomy; he would approach it how an architect approaches a landscape, seeing its totality while admiring its separate parts and absurdities.

There are a few pieces of Lebrun’s artwork that defined his highly-accomplished career, but one exemplary work of his from the mid-40s was especially consequential to his artistic perspective according to Lebrun himself. In 1945, he created his abstract painting, Vertical Composition, which was part of a series of paintings he created during his stay at Rancho Jabali, a ranch owned by fellow artist and former student Channing Peake in the Santa Ynez Valley north of Santa Barbara. Resulting from his solitary walks in the ranchlands, he explored space and form in new ways, now with a different subject: farm machinery. In Lebrun’s book Drawing, he describes the farm machinery in the same way he would depict human anatomy and even described it in animalistic forms. In his words, “The open works of the tractor were organs with the clangor of orange blood. . . . The seeding and planting machines were made in the likeness of the locust and the mantis—savage, alert, predatory. The disk harrows were vertebrate; so was the bone-white, upright structure of the axle and wheel.” His perspective toward his subject matter did not change, despite the subject matter itself changing, in which he admitted “Perhaps I moved away from the figure, but not from the anatomy.” His theme of death and destruction, which were described to be the “main ingredients” in his work, did not stray away from this series and his following work, including Terrified Woman with Child.