Kenneth Noland painted Keen Transit in 1967, using a reverse acrylic on canvas technique 'in which layers of paint are built up on a primed canvas'. This singular way of producing paintings, was perfected throughout his series of diagonal 'diamond' paintings in the post-war period and brought by the influence of his move to New York, approaching conceptualism.

Noland manifested an interest in the emotional effects of line and colour, expressed in geometric forms; this commitment can be traced to his Circle Paintings and extended visual language of diamonds, horizontal bands, plaid patterns, and shaped canvases. Of his prolific art production between 1965 and 1967, he said, 'The diamond is used to accommodate not lines but coloured bands in chevron formation…At once open and delimited, they have no unambiguous, behind-the-frame feeling; they seem to be simultaneously a cut-out from a series of larger chevrons marching off in one direction and a completely self-sufficient picture object' (Kenworth Moffett, Kenneth Noland, New York, 1979).

Of Noland, the late art critic of The New York Times, Hilton Kramer wrote, 'An art of this sort places a very heavy burden on the artist’s sensibility for colour, of course—on his ability to come up, again and again, with fresh and striking combinations that both capture and sustain our attention and provide the requisite pleasures…Mr. Noland is unquestionably a master.' His experimentation with non-standard canvases allowed for innovative compositions enhancing the chromatic effects. The artist noted that he thought of 'painting without subject matter as music without words'.