Snake at Watercress XV
€170.00
Out of stock
Watercolor on canvas
23.5 x 30.5 cm.
Signed
2026
This watercolor belongs to the Fuente del Berro series: a fragment of snake in Watercress Park, Madrid. The garden is historic and enclosed—a spring the Habsburgs trusted, a ría, ponds, a cascade—pressed against the city’s noise. In a quiet corner the water still murmurs to the stone. What the sheet keeps is only a portion of a presence: there and not there.
A dark oval of indigo and Payne’s grey sits at the left, almost a head, almost a wet stone. Paler lobes gather beneath it, a body that will not finish, scales withheld, only weight and fade. A thin grey path loops through the field, the ría or the animal’s own thought of a path. From above, a single vertical of saturated blue falls and ends in a bead—the fountain spending itself, a drop, a tongue of gravity. A lighter circle floats near the top, a reflection, a hole in the veil, a pause.
The park’s contemplative spaces exist because this kind of motion continues when Madrid does not look. The snake is not a specimen and not a symbol to be solved. It is the slip between reflection and reality: water taking an animal’s curve, an animal taking water’s transience. Certainty is already in short supply beside the highway. The fragment is the honest form.
Pigment meets the tooth of the paper without correction. The dark oval granulates and keeps a cooler streak inside, like light on a flank. The drip is clearer, more decided. The lobes are climate. White reserve is the air of the corner, the flash on the basin. No foliage, no path sign. Only the murmur, the slip, and the drop.


