"Tsvetaeva: Not Exile, Not Home", acrylic on canvas, 14x18 inches, Bishop Maxim, 2026

Not a portrait, exactly. More an attempt to get close to whatever it was that made her poems possible — that inner country she carried around and couldn't put down. She appears in blue, against violet. The white horse is there beside her, as horses tend to be in the Russian imagination: freedom, fate, something between the two. Her hair is orange — almost aggressively so. It seemed right. Birds cross the sky above her, the way thoughts cross when you're somewhere you didn't choose to be. Faint church domes in the distance. Not Russia as a place, but Russia as something you remember against your will. She looks out. Not at you, not away from you — somewhere in between. That seems right too. The tragedies are not the subject. They never were, with her. What lasted was the force underneath them.