A large, purely abstract watercolor that achieves the most extreme color saturation of any work in the collection — a composition of overlapping color masses in blue, green, yellow, purple, and red-brown that reads simultaneously as weather, as geological strata, and as pure chromatic event. The marks are large, loose, and freely applied — this is Sidney working at speed, trusting the colors to find their own relationships.
The dominant movement in the composition is horizontal — the color masses sweep across the picture from left to right in broad bands, each dissolving into the next through the wet-into-wet technique. The palette is the fullest in any single work: the entire visible spectrum from red-purple through blue-teal through green-yellow, all present simultaneously, none subordinated to any other.
At the lower edge, barely rendered, small bird marks — a flock of tiny figures in dark ink — float below the color masses in a pale field. These birds are the only marks of a different scale and a different hand from the large color washes above them, and their presence gives the abstract color event its spatial reading: this is a sky, and the birds are below it, flying through the pale zone between the color masses and the earth.
The birds transform everything. Without them, this is color study; with them, it becomes an atmospheric landscape of the most reduced kind — sky as pure color, birds as the only life.