Wings of a Swallow

Artist Lillie Morris was the only visual artist asked to respond to another artist’s work and so entered into dialogue in a way that was both familiar and testing. How does one create a painting in response to another painting and not treat it in a derivative or literal way? In responding to Jack Yeats’s “Singing, Oh, Had I the Wings of a Swallow” (1925), Morris decided to start from the emotional and embodied place of being a singer herself. The dialogue was not only with the painting but with that musical part of herself. It was also a dialogue with the metaphysical, as she understood “that sense of being transported” that music offers, especially when one sings.