Karen Lehrman wrote about this image in

Of the 40 works in this show, Ena Swansea's Fall is the rebellious black sheep. Literally. While the other works rest comfortably on translucent white paper, earnestly allowing light to reflect through the layers of color, Fall perches tensely on untextured, non-reflecting black matboard. While the other works offer an array of vivacious colors, Fall submits only a deadening white and silver.

Then there's the matter of subject. The other works either have no subject or allude to an ambiguous one. The subject of Fall is not only fairly identifiable, but she too was a black sheep: Louise Brooks, the 1930s star who played the Hollywood studio system with proto-feminist cunning.

Fall is an anti-watercolor as much as Brooks was an anti-star. Rather than obscuring Brooks with a myriad of transparent veils, Swansea unsentimentally exposes her. We see a contemplative, rather lonely young woman. Her chalk-white face is free of both make up and deception; her head and upper torso float in a silvery celluloid hell.

KAREN LEHRMAN, executive director of the View Foundation, is writing a book on the substance of style.

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Born in Charlotte, North Carolina; attended University of South Florida; various group exhibitions in the East Village, New York, in the 1980s, including Auto da Fé, PPOW, 1986; two-person exhibition, with Robert Miller, at P.S. 122, New York, 1996; debut solo exhibition, Dorothy Blau Gallery, Miami, 1998 followed by solo exhibitions at Robert Miller, 1998 and (scheduled) Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, 2002. Swansea received a purchase award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters annual invitational, 2001.