Sybil Davis Emerson did this composition while living in Berkeley, California, while teaching at the California College of Arts & Crafts (now the California College of the Arts) in nearby Oakland. By the 1950s she had lived and exhibited throughout the U.S. and in France for three decades, studying with leading Modernists at the Art Students League and with André Lhote at Académie Falguiere.
This abstracted, flat-plane drawing of a railroad crossing reads like a stained glass window, her use of delicate aquamarine and cloudy gray appearing to illuminate the shapes formed by the crossing cables.