Some paintings begin as images and become questions. In Michele Lear’s Angel Wing, a stained-glass-inspired angel starts as theatre work but becomes the visual language of Kareena’s life.
Its enormous wing appears protective, but from a distance the angel also carries a sinister edge. The contradiction is central. Protection can comfort, but it can also conceal pressure and control.
Painting with a Secret
Kareena does not intend the figures beneath the angel to resemble Jenny, her mother and herself. She recognizes the connection only when the painting is nearly finished. That resemblance gives the artwork authority. It seems to know something Kareena has not fully admitted.
The theatre is where the painting takes shape, and where Kareena begins experiencing another self. Working on backdrops at the LSPU Hall gives her refuge from the tensions of home. Jenny, an accomplished local actor, becomes an important presence in Kareena’s imagination. Kareena is fascinated by Jenny’s ability to inhabit another character while confronting feelings she cannot name.
The novel’s title image belongs to several emotional territories at once: art, desire, family, memory and identity. The painting becomes a record of what she sees before she has the language to explain it.
Two Faces
The novel repeatedly considers the distance between appearance and inner life. Jenny can move between emotions as an actor; Kareena begins to recognize a similar division within herself. She describes feeling as if she has two faces: the self she has always carried and an “acting” self that is becoming entangled with it.
That tension extends to Kareena’s family. Her mother, Grace, is not presented as a single, easily understood figure. When Grace takes a temporary job at a church bookstore, Kareena sees her differently: happier, animated and almost unfamiliar. She wonders who her mother might be beyond that role.
Michele allows these revelations to remain complicated. Kareena observes gestures, moods, and conversations, then carries them forward. Memory changes meaning as the observer grows older.
The Second Wing
Years later, the angel returns in Kareena’s recurring dream. The protective wing has changed. A second wing appears, gripping and smothering the figures beneath it. The image turns the novel’s central symbol inside out. What looks like shelter can become confinement when protection demands submission.
That reversal gives Angel Wing much of its emotional force. Kareena’s journey carries her away from the theatre and Newfoundland, into education, teaching, northern communities, relationships, crisis, and eventually a life built more deliberately around her own choices. Art remains a place where contradictions can coexist.
A Life Reclaimed
By the later chapters, Kareena has created a studio in her apartment, returned to writing and art, and taken work connected to The Rooms while continuing her own artistic practice. Her future is no longer defined by what she must endure. It is something she can shape.
The angel’s meaning changes with her. It becomes neither simply protection nor solely confinement, but a reminder that the past can be carried without surrendering the future to it.