A compositional study that reads as Sidney working out ideas rather than completing a finished work — and one of the most revealing works in the collection for what it shows about his process. The right two-thirds of the composition is occupied by rows of horizontal pastel stripes in varying colors: black, red, purple, teal, yellow, dark green, gold, brown — arranged in loose horizontal bands with gaps between them. This is the same vocabulary as The Color Chart (381) but applied here in pastel rather than watercolor, and with the stripes slightly more varied in width and spacing.
At the left, the stripes give way to a cluster of spiral forms — four or five overlapping spirals in pink, green, and gray-black, their concentric rings overlapping and interweaving. These spirals occupy approximately a third of the composition, creating a clear visual dialogue between the linear system of the stripes and the rotational system of the spirals.
The composition has the quality of a comparison test — Sidney placing two of his primary formal vocabularies side by side to see how they relate. Do the stripes belong to the same visual world as the spirals? What happens at the border between them? The work doesn't resolve these questions but asks them clearly.
The unsigned state and the exploratory quality both suggest this is a working piece — a sketchbook page at large scale, the thinking visible on the surface.