As one of the trio of angelic figures in the 1969 Annual Collection, Arctic Angel stands out as a meditation on line. Unlike its companions, Ecclesiast and Winter Angel, it’s rendered in a single colour—but that restraint only amplifies the hypnotic repetition of swirling patterns. The wings, in particular, fold into the composition with an Escher-like logic: improbable, intricate, and oddly believable. Printed on fibrous mulberry paper, the work gains an added softness; the texture itself evokes the downy lightness the Western imagination so often assigns to angel wings.

Pudlo’s work offers a compelling case study in how Christian imagery once seen as foreign came to feel utterly at home in the visual vocabulary of contemporary Inuit art. For Pudlo, these Christian elements are not set apart or framed as exotic. They are integrated, even seamless, alongside traditional forms and imagery. Pudlo’s openness to new experience allowed him to treat Christian symbols not as colonial residue, but as imaginative tools.