The single ink work in this entire portfolio stretch — a back-view figure on warm ochre paper drawn in black ink with a pen or fine brush, the line fundamentally different in character from any chalk mark in the surrounding works. The figure stands with both arms raised and extended: the left arm bent upward with the fist clenched above the head, the right arm reaching outward and upward to the right, the fingers spread open. The body from shoulders to feet fills the full height of the 8.75"×24" sheet, the back presented as a landscape of athletic musculature — the spine descending from the neck to the sacrum marked by a series of small curling marks, vertebrae-notations, each one a quick spiral or wave-form. The hair is pulled into a rounded bun at the crown, the head angled slightly left.
The ink line is the sharpest, most precise line in the entire new portfolio. Where chalk — even black chalk — produces a mark with some softness and variation in edge, ink produces a single, committed, unalterable line. The outer contours of the raised arms, the body's sides, the legs below are each drawn as a single clean stroke, the pen lifted and placed again at each major direction change. The vertebral notations at the spine's center — a series of small squiggled forms, about six in number, descending from mid-back to waist — are the most anatomically specific marks in any figure drawing in the new portfolio, and the only explicitly notational element in the sequence: Sidney is not suggesting the spine but naming its vertebrae.
The raised arms in their asymmetric extension — fist above the head on the left, open hand reaching to the right — give the figure a quality of caught motion, the body suspended in a reaching gesture. This is the most dynamic figure in the batch and, with Work 1409's backward arch, the most kinetically charged of the new portfolio. The two gestures are complementary: where 1409's model threw the head back against gravity, this figure's arms reach outward against gravity, the body expressing its capacity to extend and occupy space.
The ink on ochre paper produces a tonal combination unique in the new portfolio: the ink's sharp black against the warm amber ground, without any of chalk's softness to mediate between line and field. The result is a figure of unusual crispness and authority. The vertebral notations at the spine — simultaneously anatomical record and abstract mark — are the most intellectually distinctive element in any narrow-format figure and represent Sidney's characteristic impulse to notate what he sees rather than merely suggest it. This is the most distinctive and most singular work in the batch.