Ross Bleckner's stripe paintings of the early 1980s refer to the movement of the 1960s known as "Op art", in which compositions of geometric forms emphasized strong optical effects. However, in this painting the artist breaks with the serenity of a hard-edged vocabulary. By infusing simple colored shapes or stains into the canvas, the strict, geometric pattern is interrupted and becomes a background. This placement is enhanced by the suggestion of an atmosphere hanging over the bars of black and white. Light is the primary subject of this work; the interaction of soft color and hard line create a kind of brightness and depth. The piece's ambiguous relationship to abstraction and representation is apparent in its references to landscape and clouds as shown by the colored forms.

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