Flower Clouds

This is a small, colorful drawing by the French artist Odilon Redon, about the size of a large picture book lying open. It is made with pastel, which is a soft stick of pure pigment that is rubbed onto paper. The paper is blue-gray, and its color helps set the mood. At the center is a sailboat carrying two figures. They travel across a glowing sea beneath a sky that seems just as unreal. Nothing here looks quite like the everyday world. Sea and sky both shine with strange, almost electric color, as if the whole scene were seen in a dream.

Start with the boat, a small skiff with a sail, and find the two figures riding inside it. The museum suggests they may be two saintly women, though Redon does not make this plain. Then let your eye move out from the boat into the sea and sky around it. The colors there glow, a quality called phosphorescent, meaning they seem to give off their own light. Look too at how the pastel is handled. Redon rubbed it softly in places, scratched into it in others, and added touches of brush, so the surface changes from smooth haze to sharper marks.

Odilon Redon was a French artist who studied with Rodolphe Bresdin. For years he worked only in black and white, making charcoal drawings, lithographs, and etchings. These dark works are known as his Noirs, a French word meaning blacks. They were drawn from his imagination, and in the 1890s they began to win praise from critics and the public. Just then, Redon discovered color through pastel. This new way of working changed his subjects as well. Flower Clouds dates from around 1903, and belongs to a group of pastels from these years with a strongly spiritual feeling.

Redon's earlier black works were full of nighttime turmoil. In this pastel, the mood has changed. The museum suggests the dreamlike boat may stand for Redon's own inner journey, now carrying a more hopeful vision. The journey feels timeless, as though the boat has always been sailing and always will be. The intense, glowing color matches the deep spiritual feeling of the subject. Before you move on, look again at the two small figures in the boat, and notice how much light and color surround them.