a love letter to my muse

Big Ideas | Artists and Members | Inspiration

This past Valentine's Day, Fractured Atlas was struck by cupid's bow and commissioned artist Lara Antal to write a love letter on a subject of their choosing. Lara went above and beyond, creating a collage that blends typewritten words, digital elements, and soft notebook sketches. We hope you enjoy this letter as much as we did!

to my beloved muse This letter began as a message in a bottle, a declaration of love for a hazy recipient, sent to an unknown address. I wanted to meet my muse: the invisible impetus that spurs me on to make art. My wish was to find you, and for you to discover me as well. I decided to take on this silly and sacred mission to discover, divine, or otherwise define you. In a strange set of synchronicities, I was commissioned to write this love letter while en route to Paris for the first time. My dear, you can’t make this kind of shit up. While I didn’t know you, I did know our relationship has been the most enduring, deep, and revelatory in my life. At times I’ve heard your message, at varying volumes, so clearly. You are a song, a whisper, and an echo. Yet, I’d never taken the time to define your shape; to map out your edges and overlay them against my own. Perhaps it’s my guilty heart—having taken you for granted all these years—but lately I’ve wanted to see you, to know you. I felt if I could do this I would be closer to the source. The old-fashioned notion of “the muse,” channels inspiration into a form we can all understand: a classically gorgeous woman, half mistress and half Madonna, who beckons (male) artists to step forth and seize their destiny, their visions. I’ll admit that in my wildest masc fantasies, I am one of those dapper men; a poet who writes sonnets in your name, wracked with pleasure, guilt, ennui, and a burning passion for you, my Pgymalion love. Lofty, romantic, and estranged (possibly deranged?) from any reality. In 2025, with the body I was born into, the social restrictions it carries, and the mutable identity and mind I cultivated alongside it, this fantasy is incongruent. There is no place for this gendered, orderly narrative in my life as I experience it. Yet, this made me all the more excited to see your reflection cast upon an up-to-date surface. How would you look to me? How could I see you in a meaningful light in this contemporary, dark world? This would be an exercise in post-modern scrying. I began this practice on the plane, my gaze transfixed on the dark porthole window as we descended upon the City of Lights. I looked for you on the countless countenances in Paris’ most holy temples of art. I saw some of the most heart-achingly rendered faces known to human history. These made me gasp and sigh in the way only art can. Yet, I still saw idealized projections lacking truth. I first encountered you in the startling gaze of Manet’s Olympia. An image that depicts a sex worker and her maid, you are channeled through the model’s defiant and self-possessed stare. She was a real woman who walked on the earth, making no apologies. I was grateful Manet saw the power in showing her as such. I next encountered you in Suzanne Valadon’s paintings. A model turned artist, she invoked you through fluid, confident lines. She drew women as native shapes that, for so long, had been mapped by foreign hands. This muse kept her visions for herself. I could feel you in the endless loop of inspiration and self-definition. For days I gorged on copious amounts of artwork, scribbling notes and feeding my saccharin fantasies. I wrote invocations in your name and wondered where you were hiding. My love, I observed Paris all the while drawing you. And then one day I reached my limit for museums and laminated pastries. To my shock, since I have NEVER had my fill of either! Both my mind and stomach were full. So I stopped my mission and put away my journal. In an exhausted stupor, I wandered alongside canals and Haussmannian architecture. It was dreamy and delightful, but I couldn’t help feeling a touch disappointed. As a detective, I had compiled a case file chock-full of clues, yet had no working theory. Even in the City of Love, I could not write a thesis on the muse. A few days after I returned home and discovered a note on my phone entitled “Love Letter.” In my jetlag, sleep-deprived madness I had finally written to you. I poured over my patchy memory, trying to place when I had penned it. Was it on the plane after the French woman cuddled up to me across three seats? Was it once I collapsed on my bed in Brooklyn, too tired to fend off my senior Chihuahua’s obsessive licks? Then it hit me: I hadn’t written you a love letter, you had written me one. My efforts to consciously source your ingredients felt like a failed experiment, all the while you were unconsciously alchemizing them for me. An ouroboros of inspiration. Your letter to me: To the diffused parts The parts that blur That allow me to be timestamped That dissolved like dust, like light And allow me to mix and blend To pick up parts of other colors To swirl and fade in and out I will end this correspondence with gratitude: to my beloved muse, who has traveled alongside me, in the corner of my eye, for as long as I can remember. Your power lies in elusiveness; in an inability to be pinned down by one painting, city, concept, or examination. It is your fluidity that allows my message in a bottle to be carried, to whomever it is meant to reach.

About Lara Antal

Lara (she/they) is an award-winning creative known for their vibrant, conceptual, and interdisciplinary approach. With experience leading teams and projects at the world's largest publishers and brands, their work exemplifies what communicative and compelling visual storytelling can be.

Inciter Art

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a love letter to my muse

About Lara Antal