Design for a Prayer Rug 1909

Odilon Redon made this Design for a Prayer Rug, but when, I can’t say. It’s all intuitive color and a kind of meditative, pattern-making. You can feel him, like me, just building up the image, one mark at a time. Look at how he’s built up the colors, that rusty ground with those little dabs of reds and yellows. The paint seems thin, washy almost. The opposite of impasto. Then in the middle, he’s built up the blues and greens into this kind of floating vase of flowers or… is it something else? A figure? The way that dark blue drips down into the bottom makes me think about a Rothko. Art’s an ongoing conversation. We all borrow and steal, and then add our own thing, that little twist that makes it new. Redon certainly had his thing. It’s like he’s inviting us to dream along with him.