Celmins had completed two small wood engravings of the ocean surface before making this image, which she worked on for four years. Like woodcut, wood engraving is a relief technique whereby the area around an image is carved from a block of wood, leaving only the raised surface to be inked for transfer to a sheet of paper. In wood engraving, however, a tool known as a graver rather than a knife is used to make finer lines and more detailed incisions. Here, Celmins incised the hard block with a seemingly infinite array of strokes that range from the deepest black at the lower right to white at the upper left. Each cut is skillfully placed to enhance the remarkable surface rhythm of this tightly constructed field.