Everything in the room was given to her. The pomegranate, the flowers, the silk, the hours with nothing to do. The one thing she wanted, nobody could hand over.

Almoraa was born into a house where the doors were beautiful and always closed. Status protected her from the world and, in the same gesture, kept her from it. So she found the only exit available to a girl in a palace: she opened a book.

I drew her at the moment the room stops mattering. Her eyes are still in the sanctuary, but she isn’t. The birds move around her because she has already gone somewhere they can follow and she cannot not in body, anyway. The pomegranate sits at her side, split and abundant, and it changes nothing. Wealth was never the thing that freed anyone.

The idea I kept returning to while working: a gilded cage is still the most comfortable room in the house. That is exactly what makes it hard to leave.

At 39 × 45 inches this is one of the largest sheets I have worked on, and I built it the way I build everything: a single grade of pencil, one layer over another, hours across months. A drawing this size gives you nowhere to hide. Every square inch of that fabric and every feather is a decision made in sequence, and none of them can be undone.