One reason why even Kline's small paintings take on a grave and monumental look is that he extends the main forms off the canvas into "your" space, thus sucking you in whether you like it or not -- unless every photo of his work in the book was cropped (god, I hope not).
So in this one I fixed some of the shapes and marks, and it's better. Not good, but better. I'm still working on the idea of including the color of the yellow pages and ordinary phone book paper, and even the color of some of the ads, along with the curving angled marks that intrigue me. These are not Kline colors. Even in his later paintings, he generally started with a white ground, though often layered black on top of a colored underpainting.
Since it still wasn't right, I tried putting different shapes from my pile of collage materials (from when I spilled my bottle of ink the other day), so that's what the shape in the middle is.
UPDATE: Shape looked too goofy for words. Removed it....
It may stay there or not. Today was not a particularly good Klinish day. May post another one that's almost done later, and one that is really really ugly and bad, too.
Later.