The early American modernist Arthur Dove was one of the first artists in the United States to produce purely nonrepresentational compositions, and throughout his career he used abstract forms to express the profound inspiration he found in the natural landscape. “Anybody should be able to feel a certain state and express it in terms of paint or music,” he stated, “to feel the power of the ground or sea, and to play or paint it with that in mind, letting spirit hold what you do together rather than continuous objective form.”

In "Sea Gull Motive (Sea Thunder or The Wave)," Dove conveyed a powerful and emotional experience of nature at the ocean’s edge. Silhouetted against cloud-like bands of white, the black, double-arced form stretching across the canvas at upper left evokes a seagull soaring above a roiling sea.