An Angel to Lucy

Encaustic and Oil on Wood Panel. Unframed 16"x16" / 40cm x 40cm

An Angel to Lucy by American-Argentinian artist Miguel Perez Lem, continues an intimate series devoted to memory, fragility, and inner resilience. Rendered on a warm wood panel, the partially revealed figure emerges with restrained sensuality, her body intersected by a wing that appears at once protective and wounded. The Hebrew word for angel, inscribed directly onto the surface, anchors the work in a spiritual register—suggesting guardianship not as perfection, but as presence through fracture.

The artist builds the image through a layered process: charcoal establishes the body’s soft yet tense contours, oil paint lends the skin and feathers a muted luminosity, and encaustic seals the surface in a translucent hush, as though the image were held inside memory rather than fully revealed.

Along the edge of the panel, lyrics by Martina McBride—“She keeps an eye on the sky / With a broken wing… Man, you ought to see her fly”—quietly frame the emotional core of the painting. The text does not illustrate the image; it resonates with it, transforming the wing into a metaphor for perseverance, grace under strain, and strength born from vulnerability.

An Angel to Lucy is a portrait of quiet endurance. Steeped in tenderness and presence with absence, the work honors the fragile miracle of continuing to rise—even when the wing is broken.