The most gestural and the most reduced of all the abstract watercolors — a work that strips Sidney's vocabulary to almost nothing: a single sinuous form, painted in coral-orange with a textured granular quality, coiling across the white ground in large sweeping curves. The form is unmistakably serpentine — it coils, it loops, it doubles back — and yet it is also purely abstract, purely a painted mark extended across the paper in a single continuous gesture.
Against this orange form, two secondary systems operate: thin lines in dark blue, running in parallel tracks that follow and then diverge from the orange form, occasionally spiraling into small tight coils where their energy concentrates; and a second set of marks in deep purple-crimson that run alongside the orange form in places, adding shadow or depth or a different chromatic voice to the composition.
The white ground is essential — not empty but breathing. The serpent needs space to coil; without the white, the form would be trapped. Sidney understood this and left the ground alone, resisting the accumulation that characterizes his more complex works.
This is a drawing more than a painting — the line is the subject, not the color field. It connects directly to the figure drawings in its fundamental commitment to the single extended mark, to the question of how much a line can carry. The answer here is: a world. The serpent coils through space, and the space coils back.