In Foy's midcentury universe, when humans seek the comfort of familiar spaces they discover instead amorphousness, velocity, and weightlessness. The pictures also reflect an affinity with the work of American Realists such as Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry, whose tropes include the overlapping vignettes of mural painting, often populated by figures whose bodies are contoured or distorted to mimic their immediate setting. Foy himself referred to his imagery as “hyper-realism,” stating in 1948 "I may turn out to be a realist. After all, hyper-realism actually becomes the supernatural.” A realist direction was fostered when his wartime employment ended and he moved back to Dallas to renew his art studies at Southern Methodist with his teachers Jerry Bywaters and Otis Dozier, both referred to as Lone Star Regionalists. The "Dallas Morning News" said Foy's "provocative Surrealist pencil drawings are the sensation of the current year-end exhibit at SMU." In September 1946, on his first trip to New York, the twenty-four-year-old Foy took his portfolio to the influential art and literary publication "View" magazine. In the fall of 1946, "View" published "Untitled [Courtyard with Morphing Figures]" (1946), a seamless mix of the marvelous and the monstrous and its appearance launched Foy's career. Foy moved to New York in spring 1947, enrolling at Columbia University to study studio art and art history, as well as anatomy and botany, two fields that underpin much of his imagery. Soon, as in Pavel Tchelitchew’s work, Foy began his own explorations merging plant life with human features. Foy sought gallery representation, and R. Kirk Askew became his first and only dealer at Durlacher Bros. on 57th Street. Reviewers noted the rigor of Foy’s scrutiny, describing his “microscopic vision” and “infinitesimal details glossed over by the average vision.” But by the time of his first one-person exhibition at Durlacher's in April 1951, Foy had nearly abandoned Surrealist imagery and began concentrating instead on the depiction of botanical organisms undergoing transitional states. The "New York Time"'s critic Stuart Preston wrote: "Foy's pencil and brush spin out a tissue of delicacy and transparency, light enough to seem to have settled on the paper like frost, strong enough to have netted in its gossamer texture enough visual data about the plant forms to astound a botanist."