The most formally experimental of all the abstract works in terms of its relationship between frame and content — and the companion piece to The Framed World (422). Where 422 has a hand-painted border of dots and chevrons enclosing a densely populated abstract interior, this work inverts the relationship: the border is the painting, and the interior is almost empty.
Four thick bands of multicolored stripes — each band containing perhaps fifteen to twenty parallel lines in yellow, green, red, blue, pink, orange, brown, and black — fill the four corners of the composition, sweeping inward from each corner toward a central white field. The stripes in each corner band are parallel to that corner's diagonal, creating a frame of concentrated color energy that surrounds and defines the white center.
The white center is not blank. Faint traces of marks are visible — ghost forms in pale blue and gray, the suggestion of a figure or a face or simply the working beneath the final decision to leave this space empty. Whether Sidney intended these traces or whether they are working notes he chose not to erase is impossible to determine. But their presence makes the center feel inhabited rather than merely absent.
At the lower right, the stripes break and curl at the corner, creating a moment of organized disorder — the rigid parallel lines suddenly released, tumbling over themselves. This small rupture in the system is the most human moment in an otherwise geometrically disciplined composition.
The suggested title names the visual experience: the work is a rainbow that has organized itself into a frame. The four-corner composition creates an optical centering that draws the eye irresistibly toward the white interior — which then offers nothing but light.