Peter Miller held two exhibitions at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York; a gallery that was at the time the premiere showcase for Surrealist painting in America, with other exhibitors including Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, and Frida Kahlo. The first exhibition, staged in the Spring of 1944, was accompanied by a catalogue essay written by Robert Goldwater - a professor of art history at Queens College and author of Primitivism in Modern Painting - discerned a connection between her paintings and the work of Native American artists, particularly in the way that her "thin veils of paint evoked the distant and absolute qualities of the Indians painting."

Critics of Miller's second exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in October, 1945, observed a departure from the artist's earlier reliance upon the work of Paul Klee and Joan Miró. Henry McBride declared that "Peter Miller is now entirely American, and Western American at that,", while Howard Devree, writing for the New York Times, likewise noted that Miller was "preoccupied with Indian subject matter and forms of expression", but also commended how "violently colored and explosive" the canvases were, and linked the crudity of the artist's forms to Native American petroglyphs.

This picture was one of nineteen paintings exhibited at the Julien Levy Gallery in October, 1945. Miller knew many of the most prominent Surrealists from this period, and was especially fond of Dorothea Tanning and Max Ernst, who had moved to Sedona, Arizona, following their marriage in 1946, and here came into contact with the Native American population. Like Miller, they became enamoured with the artefacts they produced, and Ernst amassed an impressive collection of Kachina Dolls.

Miller's painterly technique was highly distinctive, and Man Thinking of Winter Fields is a superlative example of this. Here, Miller textures the ground of the canvas to the right hand-side of her figure's head, as if to mimic canyon walls, while in others she builds up the paint, with layer upon layer of different colour, before using sgraffito to reveal glimpses of the hidden hues beneath. These complex techniques, paired with Miller's innate and sophisticated sense of colour, gives her painting a quiet and eerily spiritual quality.