Stella has said that he believes that the goal of his printing is "now seems to be to make a print in which the paper—itself the recipient of the print image—is made into a pictorial surface so that the graphic apprehension of a print is, and must be, a pictorial apprehension as well." His Moby Dick Domes project certainly achieves this objective. Here, the material presence of Stella's print is undeniable, with its dome projecting into the viewer's space. The physical layering of multiple print processes compounds the artificial universe depicted in the composition. Stella chose Melville's convoluted novel as a subject in order to comment on the difficulty of rendering narrative through abstract representation.