Untitled, 1975

Since the 1970s, Hawkins has been dedicated to abstraction, drawing from geometry and nature alike. In these early pastels, she covers the paper surface in both thin sketchy lines and thick powdery swaths of vivid hues, and incorporates marks that evoke ancient cave-painted symbols and invented hieroglyphic signs. There are also musical lines in her compositions–fittingly, as Hawkins often compares abstraction to jazz. She observes that in visual art, abstraction is often “misrecognized as incomprehensible when in fact abstraction in the visual is imbued with elements similar to jazz. Those elements are call and response, movement, and color. They create and orchestrate a compositional whole that results in a musical composition, or a two dimensional composition of color, lines, and shapes.”