Flower Clouds

For years, Odilon Redon worked only in black and white, producing haunting, sometimes creepy charcoal drawings, lithographs, and etchings. Just as these black works, or ‘Noirs’, began to receive critical and public acclaim in the 1890s, Redon discovered color through the use of pastel. Flower Clouds is one of a number of pastels executed around 1905 that are dominated by spiritual overtones. Redon once described his works as: ‘My drawings inspire and are not to be defined. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined’.