Beyond the murals and the Alice in Wonderland prints, Knox Martin left behind a substantial body of works on paper from the 1970s that shows the same preoccupation with the female form on a more intimate scale. The dominant motif across this group is a frieze of interlocking women, dancing and embracing among stylised foliage, a theme Martin returned to repeatedly in loose pencil drawings, ink line work, and ink and wash compositions. Figures overlap and double back on one another, limbs and profiles compressed into the same sweeping, angular shorthand that characterised his public work, so that a single sheet can read as many bodies merging into one continuous rhythm.

Alongside these dance compositions is a more private, explicitly sexual strand, drawings of couples in close embrace, rendered in the same confident, unbroken line, but stripped of the crowd and garden setting. A few of these drawings push further into invention – one figure toys with a monkey perched on her shoulder, another is set in a domestic interior with a chair and chest of drawers sketched in around her, and there is also a purely abstract composition in graphite and wash, more fractured and gestural than figurative, showing how Martin moved fluidly between representation and abstraction.