North ↔ South: degree of relationship to recognizable subject matter
East ↔ West: quality of line, from soft/gestural to hard/rigid

On the compass, South to North is dictated by the scale from Realism to Non-Objective. The farther north a piece moves, the further it moves from recognizable subject matter. Everything between South and North exists somewhere within the broad realm of abstraction.

Because abstraction can take so many different forms, West and East describe the quality of the lines. West is hard, stiff, and rigid, while East is soft, gestural, and loose. There is crossover between the directions, so one piece of art can exist within multiple categories, but a piece cannot occupy opposite sides of the compass. All six collections contain multiple styles. The compass is designed to help the viewer see that crossover rather than force each piece into a single category.

May Mitch believes that defining herself by one style is restricting as an artist. This is a difficult concept to navigate in a world where defining a style is often the starting point for building a brand. Rather than choosing one direction and staying there, the compass allows the work to move, overlap, and exist somewhere in between.