Snake at Watercress XI

Fuente del Berro Series

€190.00

Watercolor on W & N Cotton Paper.
23 W  x 30.5 H cm.
2026
Signed Front B/R.
Unframed.

Unique Piece 1/1.
Cetificate of authenticity printed.
Blockchain QR certified by Certs 365


This watercolor is Snake at Watercress XI, from the Fuente del Berro series. In the quiet corners of Madrid’s Watercress Park a hidden fountain still murmurs to the stone. The spring is old; the Habsburgs trusted its water; a ría, ponds and a cascade give the source a course against the city’s noise. This sheet does not describe the garden. It keeps a fragment: something that slips between reflection and reality, a portion of a snake, or of water that has taken a snake’s thought.

Curving bands of luminous Payne’s grey and diluted indigo move across the paper like a body that will not stay whole. They swell, pale, and dissolve. Vertical rivulets fall through them—gravity’s pull, the fountain spending itself, fleeting thoughts that cannot hold a shape. A small, denser form sits near the top, a stone, a head, a piece of the unseen. Thin lines cross, almost a plus, the faintest structure in a place that is otherwise only passage. Most of the sheet is reserve. The fragment is the point. The viewer is asked to complete what is not given: scales in water, a flicker, an elusive presence that is there and not there.

A snake at a fountain is an old image, and here it is kept light. It is not a symbol to be decoded so much as a movement: the same coming and going the series has found in ría and drip. In a historic garden in the middle of Madrid, certainty is already in short supply. The park is contemplative because the city around it is not. The snake—if it is a snake—belongs to that interval. It lives in the wet, in the corner the visitor misses, in the reflection that breaks when a duck moves. Transience is not a caption. It is the technique. Memory is the curve that remains after the drip has passed. The search for certainty is the eye trying to finish the animal and finding only water.

The dripping watercolor is the method of that search. Organic lines are laid and then allowed to fail into gravity. Layered washes create a quiet tension: beauty suspended between clarity and mystery. Payne’s grey granulates and blooms, mineral, a little smoky. Indigo stays clearer where a ridge of pigment has been held. Edges fray. Nothing is outlined enough to become a specimen. The park’s hidden fountain works the same way. You hear it before you compose it.

Light is the paper. White is the air of the quiet corner, the flash on the basin, the gap in which the presence might still be moving. Pure pigment, uncorrected, meets the tooth of the sheet. Each curve is a declaration of matter; each rivulet is the same declaration in another tense. Texture is the slip between snake and water. You see the weave inside every band. Accident—the bead of a drip, the uneven fade of a coil—is the uncertainty the work does not pretend to solve.

What remains is a meditation the garden already knew: a fragment in Payne’s grey and indigo, a fountain’s murmur, a form that will not be whole. Madrid is outside the colour. Inside, there is only the slip, the drip, and the light.