A painter works in an expressionist style, distorting form and color deliberately to carry feeling rather than to record appearance accurately, technique bent on purpose toward the artist's own individual sense of what matters. The Sun still rules the decan and Venus the term. Wheeler's image, from the 1925 Balboa Park session, is read here through Rudhyar's 1973 language, a reading that sits in direct, probably deliberate tension with several of the sign's other early degrees, the family tree and the heirloom handkerchief among them, which prize inherited value over invented, personal value instead.
The shadow is expression so committed to individuality that it loses any capacity to communicate with anyone standing outside the artist's own particular vision. Virgo generally works within known, tested methods rather than breaking from them, so a Virgo degree given over to expressionism, tradition set aside on purpose, reads as the sign borrowing a confidence more native to Leo just behind it, testing whether discipline and invention can actually share the same canvas. Nothing in the image says whether the finished canvas succeeds with anyone beyond its maker, a question this reading leaves open rather than answering on the painter's behalf.