A large abstract watercolor of considerable energy and directional force — one of the most dynamically composed works in the abstract section. The composition is organized around two or three strong diagonal streaks of yellow-gold and teal-blue that slash across the picture from upper right to lower left, creating a sense of movement, of light traveling, of something passing through. Against these directional lines, looser color events — orange-red bursts at upper left and center, a green-yellow mass at lower center, purple forms at lower right — create a field of color incident that the diagonals cut through.
The technique here is wet-into-wet at its most expressive: the diagonal streaks are painted fast, the paint moving with gravity and momentum; the color burst forms are allowed to bloom from wet centers outward. Small scattered marks — red dots, blue dots, small color clusters — populate the negative spaces between the larger events.
The overall impression is of a weather event or a celestial phenomenon — the diagonal light beams of a sunset breaking through clouds, or the trajectory of meteors through atmosphere, or simply the most dynamic possible organization of color and energy on a white ground. The composition is the most abstract in the collection since The Release (255) — no biological or botanical reference, no spiral or geometric system, just color and velocity.
The white ground barely survives — the color events cover most of the surface, leaving only the narrowest passages of white between the streaks and clusters. This compression adds to the work's energy.