Around 1952, the same year he painted Blue Poles, Pollock appears to have begun working, at least in part, with new synthetic paints then reaching artists' studios^[1]. Leonard Bocour, one of the creators of the acrylic paint Magna, later said he gave some of these paints to Pollock, and unused Magna colours were still found in Pollock's studio at the Springs^[1]. Convergence: Number 10 shows the effect: a smooth, fluid paint that behaves differently from the medium of Pollock's earlier work, mixing on the canvas to create an almost marbled-paper-like pattern, and drying quickly enough to leave heavy, molten-looking drips rather than the thinner trails of his late-1940s pours^[1]. No technical analysis has confirmed the exact paint used in this particular canvas, so the evidence remains visual and deductive, but it fits a pattern of restless material experimentation that ran through Pollock's whole career^[1].

Pollock studied under Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League in New York from the autumn of 1930, taking painting, composition and figure-drawing classes five nights a week^[1]. He later credited Benton with giving him the only formal instruction he ever received, introducing him to Renaissance art and getting him a job in the League cafeteria, even as he described Benton's insistent realism as something he needed to react against: 'he drove his kind of realism at me so hard I bounced right into nonobjective painting'^[1]. That break came fully into focus in 1947, when Pollock's pouring technique matured into a method that could carry an entire composition on its own, built from long, controlled throws of paint applied with sticks, trowels and loaded brushes rather than by touching canvas directly^[1].

Pollock's interest in Mexican muralism began in his mid-teens, sparked by a 1929 letter from his brother Charles urging him to look at the work of Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco^[1]. He read Orozco's own declaration that mural painting was the highest and purest form of the art, and in 1930 visited Orozco's recently completed Prometheus at Pomona College with Charles; he later called it the greatest painting done in modern times and kept a reproduction of it on his studio wall until at least the late 1930s^[1]. In 1936 he also worked briefly in David Alfaro Siqueiros's experimental workshop in New York, where unconventional techniques including sprayed, pigmented paint were already in use, years before Pollock developed his own unorthodox methods^[1].