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Walhalla and The Waves form the center of Shipman’s cycle.  Chiseled from earthly materials and having taken corporeal form, the Rhine daughters have lost their purity.  They entice Alberich, the shadow of Wotan, to steal the gold that was once under their protection.  Since they have taken human form, each has acquired not only free will but desire.  The artist portrays the earthly daughters’ responses to this new-old condition: disenchantment and melancholy, insecurity, and anxiety.  Out of desperation, one of the daughters tries to grasp the gold only to be left holding a material, hardened ring.  Her pride prevents her from seeing the Truth, which is the name of the pure gold.  Shipman represents this condition by closing one of her eyes, a characteristic of Wotan.  Like Wotan, she suffers from metamorphopsia.  Her defective visual condition distorts appearances and blinds her to the Truth.  As the Rhine maidens lose their innocence and cohabitate with the material world, so the artist exchanges colorful images for dusky and dim representations, thus moving from the brush to the pencil.  The story, and the viewer, reach a point in the cycle that is darker and more forbidding than previous paintings.  The images that follow stand in stark contrast to the beginning scenes of the pictorial opera.  A woman, who herself is enveloped by the darkness of this world, warns her sister of what lies ahead.

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