My crane

A young woman with long curling hair looks directly at the viewer, her hands raised at chest height weaving a string figure between her fingers. She wears a dark robe patterned with stylized birds and feathers; at the lower left a pale, bird-like form, perhaps a crane, emerges from a smudged dark passage, while the background remains bare white paper.

Rendered entirely in grey and black tones, the work combines fine, controlled linework in the face and hands with broad, smudged textures across the robe and the hazy shape below. Light seems to rise from the paper itself, picking out the face and fingers while the garment dissolves into shadow, giving the portrait a quiet, mysterious, dreamlike air.