Muse

The canvas leaves no emptiness: every fragment — a labyrinth, brickwork, scales, dots, stripes — carries its own pattern, no two alike, as if a gaze that cannot stop looking took everything in at once and turned it into ornament. At the center is a woman's face, tilted back, eyes half-closed, lips parted: an exhale, a cry, a song. The moment when the voice has already left the body and the words haven't yet taken shape. A bird of prey has gone still beside her, just above her head — close, but not touching: such a bird has long been read as an image of aspiration, of sharp sight that picks out its target from an unreachable height, of longing for what is always a little higher, a little farther. The muse here is the one reached for, staying near, but never fully yielding. At her throat lies the frozen head of a lizard — an ancient witness, silent amid the whirl; the bird strains toward the sky, the lizard holds the earth, and both have chosen her as their point of balance. The woman's hair braids into scales, then unravels downward into tangled scarlet threads — as if the whole dense fabric of the image were woven from one and the same material.