Sarah Buckner Tender Buttons (Album), 2025

Two figures occupy the centre of a large linen canvas: a nude figure with red hair lies recumbent, while a clothed, seated figure — bearded, wearing glasses — extends one arm to hold a single thistle bloom above the other's torso. The composition is contained within a soft oval field of pale ochre and cream, rendered through layered oil, charcoal, and pastel. The surrounding ground is worked in muted violet and blue-grey, applied with visible texture and irregular, granular patterning where pigment has been built up or abraded across the surface.

The figures are drawn with charcoal line — spare and unmodelled — while oil and pastel supply localised colour: the auburn of the hair, the blue-grey of the clothed figure's shirt, the purple of the thistle head. The linen support remains partially exposed within the oval, contributing to the warm, diffuse quality of the central ground. The thistle, named in the medium as a material element, appears both as painted motif and physical reference within the work.