A large-format mixed-media work — the most dramatically gestural and most emotionally ambiguous of the large abstract works. A pink-magenta figure descends at a diagonal across the composition, the wings or arms spread in a falling or diving motion, the body rendered in broad pink watercolor washes over ink marks. A yellow radiant element at the upper right — star-shaped pencil marks — suggests a light source or destination. The right portion of the composition is a deep blue atmospheric wash, the left portion the paper's warm cream. The figure appears to move from the light-source in the upper right downward and to the left.
The pink figure's posture — spread arms, diagonal orientation, descent — reads simultaneously as diving, falling, and flying. Without a clear up and down beyond the paper's orientation, the direction of travel is ambiguous: this figure could be ascending toward the yellow radiance or falling away from it, spreading wings in triumph or collapse. The diagonal composition refuses to resolve the ambiguity.
Paired with Work 1645's suspended angel, this falling/diving figure completes a diptych of winged figures in states of ambiguous motion. Both works are large-format, both involve the same pink-and-blue color palette, and both depict winged figures whose spatial relationship to gravity is uncertain. The two works together constitute the collection's mythological section — the air, the fall, the spread of wings.