This beautiful painting is a classic example of the multi-talented and globally celebrated artist, poet, musician and writer Reza Derakshani's complex and spiritually-inclined practise. A dramatic composition, this single canvas invokes Derakshani's fondness for symbolic iconography including trees, leaves, earth and the animal world. Derakshani's delicate use of gold leaf and spindly, expressionist lines of paint delineate a mythic beast that dominates the canvas with its hulking, dark mass.

In Derakshani's work, Persian myth, symbolism and visual metaphors are frequently employed within poetic and questioning narratives. In this work of considerable formal power and emphatic composition, Derakshani finds new harmonies and dissonances between light and shade and creates compelling tensions on his canvas which radiate a quiet, potent spirituality.