William Paul Maltby Sykes, born in Mississippi in 1911, was first inspired to become an artist when he met sculptor Gutzon Borglum while visiting family in Georgia as a teenager. Because little formal art training was available at the time, he began learning through apprenticeships to other artists. After graduating high school, Sykes studied under portraitist Wayman Adams, through which he met printmaker George Miller, who became another mentor. He also worked with Mexican painter Diego Rivera on a set of murals in 1936. Sykes exhibited paintings and taught at what is now Auburn University until WWII, when he joined the Airforce and worked as a military artist in the Mariana Islands.

Sykes made both representational and abstract art during his career as an artist. He began making non-representational work in 1952 after meeting printmaker Stanley William Hayter while studying in Paris on the GI Bill. Hayter taught that the composition of a print should be guided by the materials themselves. For the next forty years, Sykes remained most interested in abstraction and the physical process of printmaking, creating expressive patterns of color and line such as this one.