Abstract Minimalist Pastel Drawing Evoking Emotion in Time and Place

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Original pastel drawing on paper. Matte/framing not included, provided only suggestive as a designer presentation. Signed on reverse. This work … Read more Original pastel drawing on paper. Matte/framing not included, provided only suggestive as a designer presentation. Signed on reverse. This work is Influenced by Robert Motherwell, Erik Sulander discovers painting as a form of thought. More particularly, Motherwell believed that the artist’s duty was not to illustrate emotion but to embody consciousness through form and gesture. Here, Sulander achieves precisely that. The four blue shapes—totemic yet vulnerable—become metaphors for states of being, akin to Motherwell’s black ovals in the Elegies to the Spanish Republic.

Where Motherwell’s forms mourned the tragic grandeur of history, Sulander’s evoke renewal and psychological resilience. His use of color inversion—cool against warm, ascension against containment—suggests an evolution of Motherwell’s dialectic: from existential gravity to contemplative balance. The painting’s minimal syntax, like Motherwell’s later works, demonstrates faith in the expressive potential of reduction. See less