Creature

A huge owl-like being crouches behind a hill of golden grass, one enormous yellow eye fixed on something outside the frame. Just beyond it, a girl in a pale dress stands on the slope, apparently untroubled, while behind her the ordinary business of a small town carries on: tiled rooftops, power lines, birds lined up on the wires, hazy hills fading into the distance. The scale is the joke and the mystery at once. The creature is big enough to flatten the houses, yet it seems more shy than threatening, hiding behind a rise the way a child hides behind a couch.

This is the work of Shaun Tan, the Australian artist and author best known for wordless picture books like The Arrival and The Lost Thing. He paints in oils in a style close to magic realism, using the flat light and slightly worn suburbs he grew up with outside Perth, then dropping something impossible into the middle of them. Tan has said his creatures often stand in for feelings that resist explanation, especially the sense of not quite belonging. Images like this one appear in his collection Creature, a gathering of the strange beings that have wandered through his sketchbooks for years.

The detail worth finding is the girl's posture. She is not running, pointing, or screaming, which suggests the creature may be hers, or at least familiar. Tan tends to leave that decision to whoever is looking.