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One of the typical traits of Piroska Szántó's versatile art, that spans across her entire life, originates from her more and more intimate relationship with nature. The swaying corn stems and sunflowers began to appear in her drawings and pastel works as the main characters of her art in the early 1940s.
They were then followed by fresh horseradish leaves, blooming and ripened poppies and curling savoy cabbages. What attracted the artist in the sprouting and withering vegetation as observed from close, was not only the possibility of recording the eccentrically beautiful lines drawn by leaves, stems and trailers, as she saw in them the embodiments of her emotional and sensual vibrations. Her experience is deep-rooted: as an orphan she was raised amid adverse circumstances in Kiskunfélegyháza. She wandered a lot in the 'puszta' surrounding the town, where the everyday, tiny changes in insignificant-looking plants gained emphasis and anthropomorphic significance in the mind of the lonely child. These were the memories that her meeting with the late drawings of Lajos Vajda that had been inspired by withered, rotten roots might have brought to the surface in her. And this is how the feelings of helplessness and anxiety caused by the war in the forties received embodiment in storm-tormented, withering corns, and sunflower heads blackened by frost. And these are the recollections that echo in the mysteriously entangled composition of her pastel drawing entitled 'Pink Moon II' that depicts a damp, foggy air suggestive of indescribable fears and the intuitive apprehension of the tragic years yet to come.
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