One of the most spare and most beautiful of the small watercolors — a work of tremendous restraint and genuine lyrical quality. The composition is essentially a sky painting: pink and white at the top, graduating through pale blue to a band of deeper blue at center, with a vivid yellow-green coastal strip at the lower right that is the only suggestion of earth in the composition. At the upper right, a deep purple-blue vertical form — perhaps a coastal cliff or headland, perhaps pure atmospheric color — anchors the composition's warmest note.
The sky is handled with extraordinary freedom: large wet washes of pink and blue, allowed to bloom and dry with their natural edges, no corrective marks visible. This is the watercolorist's pure act — laying the wash and trusting it. The result has the quality of a sky actually seen, the colors neither too literal nor too invented.
At center, almost impossibly small, a loose grouping of birds — perhaps twelve or fifteen, each rendered as a simple curved mark in dark teal — hovers in the pale blue field between cloud banks. They are the only drawn element in an otherwise purely painterly composition, and their presence transforms the work: the vast sky suddenly has scale, the birds suddenly have distance, the whole painting reorganizes itself around the fact of these small creatures in all that air.
The suggested title names the two elements that make the painting: the birds and the water they fly over. The land is almost absent. This is the open world.