A woman kneels amid a misty, liminal space, her hands open and empty on her lap, blackness behind her. She stares abjectly into the middle-distance, off canvas and toward the right, her eyebrows just barely knitting together. She has pale skin and auburn hair, which is on fire, burning hot and bright - an inferno. The light and shadow from the fire throws her body and the surrounding atmosphere into an eerie red-orange light. Three shadowy hands reach up through the mists below her. Orange sparks whip around her in a vortex of wind, blowing the fire up and towards the right. Cool reflections linger in the shadows, in between darkness and redness. On the left, her body and the mists below her are shadowed in a numinous red, while on the right, the dim, sickly blue of the mists twirl. She is empty, both frozen and inflamed, fire burning from nothing, paralyzed in the in-between.

Inferno (Anima Sola III)

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Presenting Inferno (Anima Sola III). Completed September 2023.
I did not die, and I was not alive;
think for yourself, if you have any wit,
what I became, deprived of life and death.
Io non mori’ e non rimasi vivo;
pensa oggimai per te, s’hai fior d’ingegno,
qual io divenni, d’uno e d’altro privo.
–Inferno 34, The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri

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