Eventually Dusti Bongé's surrealist works shifted in subject matter. After the war, Dusti had decided to take studio classes at the 331 Chartres Street School in New Orelans. These included life drawing sessions, hence her sketchbooks of that time filled with quick figure studies, many of them blind contour drawings. These studies are of a variety of characters, outside the studio, such as friends and family in relaxed postures, often seated, reading books, smoking, napping, or of other scenes like jazz musicians playing, or people dancing.

Simultaneously, her surrealist work shifted in both form and content toward compositions filled with human-like figures, which she referred to as Keyhole People. The latter appear to be morphed versions of the blind contour figures. They are highly abstracted, surrealist humanoid forms with exaggerated, often rather attenuated, proportions. 

They are enigmatic creatures are identifiable as “people” by the placement of one or two “eyes” or keyholes. The figures are often placed together in small groups, sometimes in a beach-like scene with birds, fish or waves. The signature “keyholes” appear like white voids in otherwise colorful figures.