Possess

A personal piece. Two stags - the larger enclosing the smaller.
The work is built around a deliberate refusal to resolve. The pose is an embrace, and an embrace is legible as protection, possession, grief, hunger, or intimacy without changing a single line of it. I built the composition so that the physical gesture stays constant while the reading shifts entirely with the viewer.
Technically, the challenge was making the ambiguity emerge from the softness rather than in spite of it. The rendering leans into warmth and weight (heavy fur, pale flesh tones, ambient light pooling in the fur rather than raking across it) so that the discomfort comes from the closeness itself, not from any grotesque element. The antlers interlock to remove the last of the negative space; the darkness around them gives the figures nowhere to go.
Painterly rendering, Photoshop.