The first of three works on teal green paper — an entirely new ground in the collection, the saturated blue-green surface giving the red chalk a chromatic intensity unavailable on the warm ochres and creams and whites of all previous work. The figure is seated or semi-reclining, the upper body turned and the hands raised to the face in a gesture of covering, hiding, or deep absorption — the most enclosed and emotionally compressed figure in the sanguine series. The legs extend forward and to the left, the feet at the lower left with the characteristic toe treatment. The head and hands form a closed mass at the upper right.
The red chalk on teal paper produces a color relationship of high contrast and complementary resonance: red and teal are near-complementaries, and the combination makes the red marks vibrate against the cool ground in a way that white or ochre paper never achieves. The figure's warmth is heightened by the ground's coolness, the body's red marks reading as hotter than they would on a neutral ground. This chromatic dynamic adds an emotional temperature to the drawing that the medium and line alone could not produce.
The gesture — the hands covering or framing the face, the body enclosed around itself — is the most emotionally interior of the three teal works and among the most psychologically charged figure poses in the collection. The combination of the enclosed gesture, the compressed upper body, and the vivid color relationship gives Work 1561 an emotional intensity matched by very few works in the collection. The teal ground was clearly chosen or discovered for its specific chromatic contribution — this is not a neutral choice of paper but an active one.