J.M. Henry's paintings incline towards landscape vistas without necessarily portraying landscape. Most landscape is engaged in articulated planes, capturing the experience and the details of the scenery being expressed. Henry focuses primarily on the floating horizons and indefinite margins; the penumbra of form and atmosphere that light and color reveal, reflect, or contrast through shadow, rather than any specific place. They are akin to awakening from a dream with just the vaguest, haunting sense of where you were.

Henry practices a painting technique that he calls "interference". Building up and wiping down his surfaces with thin layers of pigment that influence the subsequent layers, he creates nuances and resonances that shift as ambient light touches them, and the viewer slowly takes them in. The margins around the artist's twilit forms usually radiate with evidences of some of the vivid colors he has used to arrive at the final determination. Often they are surprisingly garish and playful, inspired by nail polish choices. and nature's more dramatic and fugitive moments.