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| Painting in ink and pastel, attempting to copy Redon's use of materials |
Odilon Redon has had a huge influence on my practice. Redon was a symbolist painter and printmaker who spent the first half of his career working exclusively in black and white before moving away from etching and into colour painting with oils and pastels. I was greatly inspired by his treatment of light and dark, and of this transition into colour.
After being familiar with his paintings, I find it fascinating to look back at the etchings from his ‘noir’ period, where you can recognise the same shapes and textures of the flowers and details he paints, but they only appear as black scrawlings in the backgrounds of his works. It shows that the vibrant colours were always present in his works, but hidden in the shadows; and looking at his paintings, it is as if the light entered and you can see the vibrancy that was there all along.
This is something that has stayed with me throughout my recent practice, in the sense that I am now very deliberate about the use of light and dark in my work, in the elements that I choose to show and not show, and it has inspired and encouraged me to depict ‘unseen elements’ in my work.
A self-portrait depicting the feeling of the sun on my skin
Les Origines (plate 2), Odilon Redon, 1883 Pegasus and the Muse, Odilon Redon, 1900