"The World is Wonderous; those who dare find only beauty here."

The humpback runs the full four and a half feet of the triptych, and the panel divisions cut across it twice without apology. The body is not painted so much as laid in courses — long strips of gold leaf, cream and grey stacked like masonry, and worked through them, legible at close range, the printed staves of Strauss's Composer's Aria. The ventral pleats become ruled lines of notation. Around the whale the ground is a scraped grey-blue wash carrying small pale discs that read as bubbles or as barnacles depending on how long you stand there. The title comes from Ariadne auf Naxos, and the score is not a reference to the opera but the physical substance of the animal.