Odilon Redon

Odilon Redon was a French symbolist painter, printmaker, draughtsman and master of the pastels. He describes his own work as "ambiguous and indefinable":

"My drawings inspire, and are not to be defined. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined."

Redon's paintings and drawings represent an exploration of his internal feelings and awareness. He himself wanted to "place the visible at the service of the invisible"; thus, although his work seems filled with strange beings and grotesque dichotomies, his aim was to represent pictorially the ghosts of his own mind.