$225.00
1 in stock
Certificate of Authenticity Included
Every original artwork ships with a signed Certificate of Authenticity confirming title, medium, dimensions, and artist provenance. Created with archival-quality pigment ink on acid-free paper.
Original ink and watercolour of a girl asleep with her fox, drawn in loose line and warm russet washes.
Sleeping Beauties began with a single unbroken line. A girl with long dark hair lies curled on her side, and tucked into the curve of her body sleeps a small orange fox, its tail wrapped close and its nose buried against her arm. Nothing in the composition is rigid. The hair spills across the page in tangled ribbons of ink, the fox is little more than a few confident strokes and a wash of russet, and the white space around them does the quiet work of holding the whole scene still. It is a drawing about trust, the kind that only exists when both parties have decided the other is safe enough to sleep beside.
The piece is worked in ink and watercolour on white paper. The ink goes down first, fast and loose, so the line keeps the energy of the original gesture rather than the caution of a corrected one. Then the watercolour arrives in soft layers, warm russet and burnt orange bleeding into the fox’s coat, muted washes pooling through the girl’s hair and along the fold of her sleeve. Where the water carries pigment past the line, it stays. Those small escapes are what give the work its breath, the sense that the scene was caught rather than constructed.
Look closely and you can trace the rhythm of the drawing. The heavy strokes anchor the sleeping bodies, while thinner, scratchier marks flick outward like half-remembered dream fragments. The girl’s arm curls protectively over the fox, but the fox leans back into her just as firmly, so it is never clear who is guarding whom. That ambiguity is the heart of the piece. Children and animals fall asleep together without negotiation, and this drawing tries to hold that unguarded moment before either of them wakes and remembers to be separate creatures.
Sleeping Beauties was drawn and painted in Dayboro, Queensland, a small town at the foot of Mount Mee where foxes are less welcome in the paddocks than they are on paper. It is a one-of-a-kind original, not a print, and it arrives framed and ready to hang. It sits naturally in a child’s bedroom or nursery, though it holds its own in a hallway or reading corner wherever a little warmth is wanted on the wall. Because every stroke is hand made, the texture of the ink and the grain of the watercolour are visible in a way no reproduction can carry.
Sleeping Beauties, cute fox and girl
