EILEEN WALTER-GREENE: A WING AND A PRAYER
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In her quiet, contemplative studies of the hawk’s wing, often shown hung by a thread from a nail and surrounded with cloth, Walter-Greene also brings about riveting transformations. Some of her paintings are simply objective studies that describe the wing’s shape, structure, and coloration. In these, the wing’s new, rather mundane role as an object for visual study seems far removed from its original powerful function. In other paintings, those that treat the wing more abstractly and expressively, it takes on a mysterious aura, transformed into a symbol of inner, spiritual movement.
Like certain Dutch still lifes immortalizing fruit, flowers, animal carcasses, and other perishables in an eternal present (while for the viewer time marches on), Walter-Greene’s paintings of the solitary wing, stripped of its glory, remind us of our mortality. But her pictures have none of the ruthless realism characteristic of such paintings, where every feather and hair of artfully arranged rabbits and hens, every glistening drop of blood and crawling fly is precisely delineated. Her approach is far more romantic. In Icon, a small-scale oil on wood panel, the hawk’s wing–a strange blue-black shape with blurred edges–hovers like a storm cloud in an overcast sky over a more thinly painted grayish brown background. Dim, soft light illuminates the feathers’ patterns of light and dark just enough to identify the shape as a wing. Small moments of drama–such as a tiny stroke of red at the wing’s right edge–reward close viewing, complicating an image that at first seems extremely reductive.
Eventually, if you stay with these paintings long enough, the cloth, the nail and thread, even the wing become unimportant. All that matters is the profound state of inner silence they produce–an unexpected and not at all unwelcome experience here amid the clatter and hustle and humidity of Chicago in July.
