“Indeed, it has been Kelly’s abiding gift to make paintings and sculptures out of ‘nothing at all,’ fashioning shapes that the eye can scan in a minute, but that long afterwards persistently albeit graciously continue to hover in the mind.”

—Robert Storr, 1988

This collage belongs to a group of five studies of a gently sloping curve that Kelly developed into a monumental eighteen-foot painting in two shades of gray. A grid of pencil lines, evidence of Kelly's characteristic precision, demarcate the blue arc, while two parallel diagonal lines define its upper and lower bounds. The study and the painting were both created in Kelly’s studio in Chatham, a town in rural upstate New York surrounded by rolling countryside.