Oil on canvas, approximately 11 × 15 inches, plus frame.

The figure is turned slightly away from the viewer, her form emerging from a restrained field of neutral tone. The painting depends upon the tension between concealment and revelation. The bare shoulder and open back establish a compositional rhythm that is both vulnerable and poised.

Light falls evenly, defining the body with precision yet without sentiment. The surrounding ground remains still, almost airless, so that the figure appears suspended in a space of thought rather than environment. The pose is not theatrical but reflective, its meaning residing in the quiet modulation of line and surface.

The title, Far Places Were Once Within Me, evokes memory’s paradox: distance experienced as intimacy. The phrase recalls Rainer Maria Rilke’s meditations in The Book of Hours, where inwardness becomes a kind of geography.

“I am the rest between two notes,
which are somehow always in discord
because death’s note wants to climb over—
but in the dark interval, reconciled,
they stay there trembling.”

The painting inhabits that interval — a pause between presence and recollection. Its power lies in containment. Through measured tone and structure, it offers a study in how stillness can hold both distance and longing without resort to narrative or display.

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