Half of Everything centers on a monochromatic still of Tess Millay (played by Joanne Dru) from Howard Hawks’ 1948 Western Red River. In this pivotal scene, John Wayne’s character offers her “half of everything he owns” in exchange for bearing him a son—a moment that encapsulates the patriarchal values, transactional gender roles, and land-centric power structures embedded in the mythology of the American West.

Rendered in burnt umber and sienna over a green-grey “dead layer”—a classical technique associated with Caravaggio—the portrait is executed with deliberately rough brushwork that recalls the loose realism of Titian. This painterly approach creates a tension between distance and proximity, evoking realism from afar and abstraction up close.

The geometric border—comprised of carmine red, chrome yellow, and cobalt blue—disrupts the cinematic still, reframing it within a triadic color system adapted from a 1933 Japanese design manual. A signature element of Whatley’s practice, this perspectival frame evokes both a distorted movie screen and the flat precision of minimalist abstraction, particularly in the vein of Ellsworth Kelly.

In recontextualizing the source material, Whatley treats the Hollywood Western not as a celebration of frontier myth, but as a subject of visual anthropology—scrutinizing what is said, unsaid, and systematically erased, particularly around issues of gender, land, and historical memory.