Beatrice Wood tried acting in her youth, and through her intimate friendship with artist Marcel Duchamp, she was also involved in the avant-garde dadaist movement. But Wood discovered her true calling in her early forties, when she enrolled in a pottery class in Hollywood, California. Although she later claimed that she had no natural talent for the potter's craft, she liked it immensely and gradually built up a reputation as one of this country's most original and widely admired ceramic artists. Known for its luminous glazes, Wood's pottery has been described as "extraordinary props for a theater of life," and her work is represented in museums across the country.

Wood's neighbor in Ojai, California, artist Alice Matzkin, based this likeness on a series of photographs that she took of Wood, at age one hundred, working at her potter's wheel. Recalling the overall impression Wood created, Matzkin noted, "It was as though the clay and her hand and the pot that was growing from the wheel were all one."