In 1962, Bernice Bing moved north from San Francisco to work as a caretaker for a vineyard near the Mayacamas mountains in Napa Valley. She stayed for four years through 1966, and in the 1980s moved north again to Philo in Mendocino County. Bing regularly returned to painting the landscape as a spiritual exploration; as she stated, “All nature is pure, and purely abstracted; the spiritual union links both the seen and unseen forces of nature.”