Nova

“Brilliant for a moment. Then changed, irrevocably, by her own light.”

Nova channels the astrophysical event of its name: a star that suddenly increases in luminosity before settling into a new, altered state. The portrait in this series captures the figure at that moment of peak radiance. JB uses the celestial palette at its most intense here, whites and golds at the center expanding outward through burning orange into the deep cool of surrounding space. The subject is not overwhelmed by this luminosity but constituted by it, the figure and the light indistinguishable at their center. Nova is the most formally dramatic of the celestial series, and the hardest to look away from.