MADRON

The Fine Art of [William Vonnoh] // 01.31.2025

“Like a delicate freedom, or a dying grace...”

-Art critic Joris-Karl Huysmans on Impressionist pastels, 1881

Ground into a fine powder, pastels reflect light in hundreds of directions. White, especially, appears to bloom straight off the page—a flash bulb, a shock. Attempts to preserve it with surface coating diminishes its luster, so most artists go without; we are left with the raw residue of a struggle, the roughness of the paper catching pigment from the colored stick as it is dragged across the page. It is a medium brilliant and unstable in equal measure, on the precipice of being snuffed out, like death itself is encoded in its DNA….

Read more about Wiliam Vonnoh’s Spring Blossoms here.

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