One of the most visually unexpected and formally inventive works in the entire collection — a domestic landscape in which the trees are painted as geode cross-sections. A red brick house with white gabled roofs and a chimney occupies the center of the composition — thoroughly realistic, specifically observed, the kind of American suburban house that existed in every Midwestern city. Flanking it, in front and beside, are trees — but trees rendered not as organic forms but as the concentric layered ovals of Sidney's geode vocabulary from Portal I and Blood Vessel.
The large tree at center-left is the most extraordinary: a perfect geode form, its concentric rings in dark blue and white and green, its irregular outline suggesting something found in a mineral shop rather than a front yard. The smaller trees at left are similarly outlined, with the layered internal structure of sliced stone. At right, the weeping willows are rendered differently — in long cascading stripes of green, yellow, and blue, their hanging branches becoming colored lines — equally invented, equally removed from naturalistic description.
At lower left, on the lawn in front of the house, two more geode forms rest on the grass — smaller, more horizontal — as if they have fallen from somewhere, or as if the lawn grows stones rather than grass.
The sky above is the most naturalistically rendered element: a deep blue at the top graduating through teal to white, with loose streaky white cloud forms. The contrast between the ordinary red-brick house and the extraordinary mineral trees gives the composition a quietly surreal quality — this is a house in a neighborhood where everything has crystallized, turned inward, become geology.
The suggested title names both what is depicted and the transformation that has occurred: The Geode House.