Flore Sous Marine
This conversation is connected to Flore Sous Marine.
This is another of Odilon Redon's pastels from his later period, when he'd fully left behind the charcoal lithographs that defined his early career. Flore Sous-Marine is part of a recurring interest in underwater and botanical subjects — soft, otherworldly forms blooming in shadowy aquatic space, rendered in the rich color and hazy contours that pastels made possible. Redon never worked from direct observation for these. They came from imagination and from hours spent studying biological specimens at the Paris natural history museum.