A girl stands at the edge of the water with one arm lifted, and a red heart is going up into the sky away from her. That is the whole painting. Everything else in it is colour.
What is actually in it
She is a silhouette. There is no face, no expression, nothing to tell you her age beyond the shape of a child in a dress with her hair lifting. Her feet are in the shallow water and the wet sand underneath her is throwing back the colour of the sky.
The heart is the one piece of true red in the picture, and it sits high and to the right, already well clear of her hand. Behind it a long pale sweep of cloud runs across the sky like something has passed through. On the left there are three spirals turning in the air, deep blue and rust, which do not explain themselves.
The sky is coral and rose coming down to turquoise at the waterline. The sea takes those same colours and lays them flat.
What pastel does with a sky like this
Soft pastel is pigment and very little else, pressed into a stick and then pressed into paper. Nothing covers it afterward — no varnish, no glaze. The colour you see is raw pigment sitting on the surface, catching the light in the room.
That is why a coral sky in pastel does not go dull. There is nothing between your eye and the colour to grey it down. The rose stays rose.
It also means there is no undo. A mark goes down and it is there, and the paper only holds so much pigment before it refuses any more. The spirals and that long sweep of cloud had to be right the first time, because a second pass over the same ground turns to mud.
Where it would live
It is a small painting with a lot of air in it, so it holds a wall without crowding it. A bedroom, a landing, a narrow stretch of hallway where someone passes it several times a day. It would suit a girl’s room, and it would just as easily suit a grown woman who knows what it is to let something go.
Available now
The original is one painting and there is no second one: Heart’s Release, original soft pastel, 8 × 10″. There is also a fine art print if the original has gone, or if a print suits the room better.
If you are weighing one against the other, here is what an original actually means and why a pastel in particular cannot be repeated. The rest of the work is in the gallery.
— DawnE