Leon Aarts – Muse Divided (c. 2012, acrylics on board)

A choir of ghosts in a wind tunnel. Muse Divided is a vertical scream of fractured inspiration, nine (or ten?) elongated figures, flayed into ribboned silhouettes, rise and fall like organ pipes in a cathedral of doubt. Painted in the wake of the 2011 Christchurch earthquake, it is Aarts’ most ambitious exorcism: the muse not absent but shredded, her multiplicity a symptom of post-traumatic overload. The canvas vibrates with the aftershock of creation itself.

Muse Divided is Aarts’ Guernica in miniature, a vertical requiem for inspiration under siege. It stands as the emotional apex of his post-2011 work, where personal fracture mirrors civic ruin. Hang it in a narrow corridor under a single overhead spot; the shadows will animate the figures into a slow, mourning dance.

Score (out of 10): 9.3 A cathedral of cracked halos—where the muse sings in nine broken voices, and silence is the tenth.