This is one of the most powerful and singular paintings in the entire collection. At nearly four feet wide, it commands a wall. The subject is a single large ovoid form — simultaneously organic and cosmic, simultaneously seed and wound — rendered in deep red-orange tones that shift from brilliant vermillion at the outer edges through darkening crimson to near-black at the two interior cavities. The form is not quite symmetrical: the left cavity is slightly longer and more vertical, the right slightly wider and more bulbous, giving the whole thing a living, asymmetric quality that prevents it from feeling like a diagram.
The background is the most assertive chromatic decision Sidney ever made on canvas: pure cadmium green, electric and uncompromising, with a soft blue form bleeding in from the right edge — suggesting either sky or shadow, a secondary presence that keeps the green from being absolute. The relationship between the red form and the green ground is not merely complementary contrast; it reads as conflict, as heat against cold, as interior against exterior.
There is a notch at the very top of the form — a small indentation, almost a wound — that introduces the only note of rupture in an otherwise sealed organic world. This is the painting Sidney chose to live with. It is complete, resolved, and unlike anything else in the collection or in the broader landscape of contemporary American painting from its era.