Kushner came to admire Richard Diebenkorn’s paintings, and the influence of his brushwork and colors can be seen in her “High Horizon Landscape” series of the late 1960s and early 1970s. She was acquainted with Helen Lundeberg and Lorser Feitelson through the Los Angeles Art Association, where they were all members. Their form of hard edge abstraction held little interest for her, but a compositional influence can be seen in Lundeberg’s landscapes with their large horizontal bands of color, some of which show only a narrow strip of sky.

In this late period Dorothy chose especially bold color and composition choices and painted with a fierce brushwork demonstrating her mature confidence.

By the mid 1960s, acrylic paint was widely available and affordable to artists. This was the answer to many of Dorothy’s problems with oil paint, to which she had an allergy.  Acrylic paint had a color intensity matched only by oil. This newfound ability to achieve vibrancy changed the tonal quality of Kushner’s “High Horizon Landscapes” series and her later “Fields of Flowers” paintings.