Making a name in the New York art scene in the early 1980s, Christopher Wool is best known for his word paintings, white canvases with black stenciled letters spelling out text like "Sell the house, sell the car, sell the kids" (in his 1998 work Apocalypse Now). In his early paintings, Wool used commercial rollers to apply decorative effects on canvas, and he has continued to explore pattern in his art. Incorporating media and techniques including photography, silkscreen, reproduction, overpainting, and erasing, Wool's work often combines human and machine marks, as in his paintings in which he smudges black lines drawn with a spray gun into gray fields.