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James Bishop was among the generation of young American painters who reached artistic maturity following the rise of Abstract Expressionism. Seeking independence from the heated art scene of New York, he chose to relocate to France in 1957, where he engaged with European models of modernism and worked in a style that he described as "Abstract Expressionism of the quieter branch."

Working with a dramatically reduced vocabulary of form, Bishop explored the materials and processes of painting itself, resulting in quietly poetic works. In the present work, he created luminous veils of off-white pigment by soaking thinned oil paint into the canvas, employing a variation on the stain technique that artists such as Helen Frankenthaler also used. A subtle architectural reference is visible at the top, where he creates beam-like forms. Poet John Ashbery aptly described his work as “part air, part architecture.”