Awakening

A bare, pale tree fills the square canvas, its branches hung with small leaves and blossoms and crowded with more than a dozen birds — crows, a hoopoe, a blue tit, a sunbird, a gull. At the trunk's base a girl lies asleep, cheek on her arm, wrapped in pale green and blue fabric, her image doubled in a still band of water below.

Silvery bark and fine linear branches sit against an ivory ground, while the birds are rendered in saturated blues, golds, and black with careful, almost ornithological detail. Light is flat and even, brushwork tightening on the plumage and softening on the sleeping face, giving the whole scene a hushed, dreamlike stillness.