Fine attended the Art Students League in the 1920s, and later studied with the abstract painter Hans Hoffman. She began her career as a non-objective painter, and belonged to the American Abstract Artists group (founded 1936) and the Eighth Street Club (1949–62), a group that met regularly in New York’s Greenwich Village to discuss and debate abstract art.

In the 1960s, Fine was experimenting with collage, often made from her own drawings. These culminated in large-scale painted wood collages. Color was a prime concern for Fine, and she used pure powdered pigment instead of premixed paint to achieve her vivid hues. In an artist statement she wrote, “My paintings speak in the only language I know–color… I like to light up a canvas with color; I like to make it shout or whisper; I like to make it spin or make forms melt softly over the whole picture.”