Hunt is known primarily as a sculptor whose works, some of them monumentally scaled, range from rough-textured and geological to sleekly aerodynamic. As with many sculptors, drawing is a crucial aspect of his practice. In the late 1960s Hunt worked at Kennedy Space Center, a NASA launch center in Florida, as an engineer's aid and draftsman. This experience profoundly influenced his art. He has compared the perspectival shift ushered in by human space travel to the development of one-point perspective in painting during the Renaissance. He began his art career in Los Angeles during the 1970s, bringing monumental works of human engineering such as the Hoover Dam and the Great Wall of China into the studio. He said, "They were readymades. I wanted to extract them from their context and location, rescale them, and put them in my studio so they could become something else." This drawing belongs to a series of around thirty that relate to sculptural works in which he explored the shape of water in the Hoover Dam, waterfalls, and rock quarries. Hunt cites a diverse array of sources for this work, including Leonardo DaVinci's drawings of deluges, Ansel Adams's photos of national parks, Seurat's tenebrist drawings--Hunt used graphite sticks to obtain the densest black he could--and the abstract forms of Clifford Still.
Titled on verso, "The Dam"