Flowers 1905

Odilon Redon made this painting of flowers with pastel on paper, but we don’t know when. The beauty of pastels is how immediate they are, how directly you can put color onto a surface and it’s obvious Redon loved that. Just look at the pink background, it's like a cloud of cotton candy! Then you see the blue vase, solid and bright, filled with a riot of different blooms. What I like about the marks is how they're not trying to trick you into thinking these are real flowers. Each petal, leaf, and stem is just a stroke of color, a bit of fuzzy texture. Notice the petals that seem to fall around the vase. These are like echoes of the flowers above, maybe they show us how a painting can hold onto a moment, or a feeling, and turn it into something we can keep looking at. It reminds me a little bit of late Monet, who took a similar interest in the stuff of nature.