Green Skirt

Between 1961 and 1967, Michael Snow created an important series titled Walking Women Works, depicting a walking silhouetted woman. The series makes use of a variety of media and techniques (painting, photography, sculpture) to interpret the motif from different angles. Green Skirt (1962), which is sketched in blue and green tones and focuses on the figure’s lower body, is accentuated by a rhythmic, sensual, and graceful movement, with gently swaying arms. “The Walking Woman Works, which he first presented in Toronto in 1962 at the Isaacs Gallery, occupied his attention for a significant portion of the years he spent in New York,” writes Robert Enright. “She was—and remains—an image with the iconographic potency of Wesselmann’s Great America Nudes and de Kooning’s toothy women, although his image is neither fierce nor consistently eroticized. But Snow was able to use the walking woman in innumerable pieces, some 200 in total, which he made before retiring her in his 1967 film, Wavelength.” This epic series succeeds in transcending a simple yet enigmatic subject through repetition, variation, and counterpoint, strongly influencing Canada’s public imagination and contemporary art world alike. Green Skirt is undeniably one of the dominant works in this series.