This delightfully eccentric subject belongs to a moment in Pudlo’s artistic development that Marie Routledge, in Pudlo: Thirty Years of Drawing (1990), identifies as a late-1960s period in which “Pudlo’s images of women become focused in a group of drawings that combine female and angel imagery with playing-card motifs” [1]. Winter Angel, with its scalloped lines and intricate regalia, calls to mind the elaborate gowns of court cards in a French-suited deck. The result is a majestic, almost theatrical figure whose wings erupt in a fevered matrix of lines, part sacred, part cabaret.

Pudlo’s fascination with angels may well reflect a kind of visual syncretism. In Christian iconography, the angel serves as a divine intermediary, a messenger caught between earth and heaven. In Inuit spiritual tradition, it is the shaman who transcends the everyday, often transforming into birds or other animals to travel between worlds. Perhaps what we’re seeing isn’t an angel at all, but a shaman mid-flight, captured in that liminal moment of becoming.

And yet, for all its layered symbolism, the figure seems blissfully unbothered by the perilous drop. With an almost mischievous smile, it floats through space, borne aloft by two great feathered fronds. The whole scene hums with improbable grace, like the old circus ballad come to life: 

“He’d fly through the air with the greatest of ease 

A daring young man on the flying trapeze.”