Female figure in blue and pink 2003

Edwin Austin Abbey made this drawing of a female figure in a red dress, and I think it’s done with pastels. The surface is quite simple and soft, and it feels more like a sketch than a finished painting, more about capturing a mood than describing the details of the figure. The smudgy pastels that Abbey uses seem to me more about the making and doing than some kind of perfect end result. You can almost feel the artist smearing the pigment across the surface. There's a softness to the way the colours blend, especially in the folds of the dress. Look at how the red of the dress almost dissolves into the grey background, making her emerge from the darkness. In a way it puts me in mind of the work of someone like Odilon Redon, using colour to conjure a dreamlike vision, something not quite real. It’s not about answers, more about questions.