There's a troubling and poetic quality to the light in this photograph-- a weird sense of an aura and luminous reverberation, as if the lens captured the moment a soul became apparent in the polymer and art became something more than a virtuoso imitation of life...
The care and sensitivity that's gone into every contour of this has resulted in something that takes a step beyond sculpture to become something more like a dream of life itself; the craftsmanship and sheer artistry apparent in every feature has resulted in an overwhelmingly beautiful representation of not just human physiognomy but also the underlying sentience and soulfulness of the human visage.
One observes all of this while sensing that one is also being observed, even though that's clearly impossible-- but that sense never diminishes; and as you reluctantly break eye contact, it's only then that you see the terrible wound in the chest, and the avian creature who either caused it, or guards it, or maybe even escaped from it, and your eyes return to the facial expression as if to understand more about the nature of the wound and the creature nearby, but all you can see is human pain and human dignity and the astonishing capacity of human endurance.
Perfectly spellbinding art, as powerful and astonishing as anything I've ever seen.