Untitled, 1975

Since the 1970s, Hawkins has been dedicated to abstraction, drawing from geometry and nature alike. In these early pastels, she covers (or nearly covers) the paper surface in a combination of thin, sketchy lines and thick, powdery swaths of vivid hues, interspersed with marks that evoke ancient cave paintings and invented hieroglyphic signs. Some lines possess a musical quality—fittingly, as Hawkins has observed that in visual art, abstraction is “imbued with elements similar to jazz,” such as call-and-response, movement, and color. As she explains, “They create and orchestrate a compositional whole that results in a musical composition, or a two-dimensional composition of color, lines, and shapes.”