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The movements do share two fundamental characteristics: the overall composition and a notably large scale. However, the Color Field painters can be defined more clearly by what they rejected in Abstract Expressionism than by what they utilized.

The Abstract Expressionists concentrated much of their energy on the gestural aspect of the individual brush stroke. In contrast with this, the Color Field painters sought either to impersonalise their art by permitting the materials themselves to create the forms or by utilizing hard-edged shapes with relatively flattened tints.

As noted above, Frankenthaler worked in both modes. Mountains and Sea possesses free-flowing elements that are at least partially self-generated, and The Human Edge utilizes hard-edged shapes with flatter tints. The more amorphous forms and the somewhat varied tints within the shapes of Tutti Frutti are somewhere in between.

Louis, of course, adopted the first approach almost exclusively. Even in his Unfolding Light, a more controlled, planned work in comparison with his earlier, free-flowing Veils, the paint has been allowed to run fairly independently of the artist’s “brush” in parallel stripes down (or up!) the canvas.

Noland, on the other hand, employed the second approach. His use of flat shapes and tints is quite distant from the gestural emphasis of the Abstract Expressionists. His almost mathematically executed geometric shapes, seen clearly in Sunshine, consist of highly uniform tones. And the slight variations present at the edges of the concentric circles result more from his system of taping than from his brush strokes.

The large scale that the Abstract Expressionists and the Color Field painters shared was a major break with the historical convention of easel painting. Although murals have been a part of the esthetic tradition for millennia, the large canvases of the Abstract Expressionists and Color Field painters were intended to be hung and, of course, could be moved from place to place.

The scale of these works, which allow 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 Frankenthaler and Louis and the centrally focused works of 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 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.

Frankenthaler, Louis and Noland employed different shapes as formats while utilizing the characteristically large scale for their works. Frankenthaler and Louis generally used different sizes and forms of rectangles and squares. Noland’s emphasis on geometric forms as structure for the display of color in his works resulted in an even greater emphasis on the shape of the canvas as well.

As Edward Lucie-Smith has noted in Movements in Art Since 1945, Noland exhibited “a growing concern with the identity of the canvas simply as an object.” He ultimately gave added emphasis to the framing edge in his attempt to create a unified whole.

For example, the importance of the canvas shape is clear in the interplay between the positive and negative spaces in Noland’s Chevron work 17th Stage. The sense of precarious balance would be destroyed if the tip were further from the bottom edge. The optical triangles that result from the empty canvas on each side of the chevron would also be destroyed if the frame were either wider or longer.

Noland’s Circle paintings, including the refined Sunshine, are exemplary of his own structural approach based on the union of geometric shapes with the optical effects of color. In Sunshine, Noland has placed an outermost circle (a band of green) within inches of the edge on a large (84”x 84”) canvas. The next circle of blue towards the center of the canvas is in close proximity to the green band.

The next concentric band, however, a golden orange-yellow, is set apart equidistantly from both the outer two bands and the innermost band of pink. The circular image as a whole, of course, is distributed equally around all four sides of the canvas. In this way, Noland maintains the structural unity of the work in spite of its significant size.

Noland pushed the limits of traditional formatting even further in other works by combining a large scale with unusually shaped canvases. Some works were formatted symmetrically with shapes such as diamonds and others were irregularly shaped.

With Noland as well as with Frankenthaler and Louis, the framing edge itself had taken on a pictorial importance unprecedented in prior traditions. In accordance with this, all three artists commonly cropped their works after they had been completed. Decisions about the ultimate size and shape of each work became the final creative act.

The significance of the large size is also particularly apropos to the color emphasis and the staining techniques of the Color Field painters. The colors gain in impact by displaying themselves broadly across the flat surfaces. This aspect is at the crux of the concept of Color Field painting—the articulation of the surface of the painting as a "field". This ambition stretched significantly beyond the historical boundaries of painting.