DEGAS A DANCE LESSON

BLOG # 9

So much to look at, full of action and yet stillness, full of details, observed, a tuned eye, a seeing eye, an honest eye. The painting is not of a grand performance but rather of effort, hard work and stamina. He has a human eye, an eye for an honest depiction of a moment, a moment of caring. He grasps the moment through an awareness of strength and weakness, of lively action and weariness, a candid view.

Degas was an innovator. Look at the unusual horizontal widescreen format, the way his dancers fall off the edge of the frame, how the floor seems to float away from us, pushing the dancers forward, pride of place.

Degas painted this picture in 1879. Photography became popular in the 1850s in Paris, enabling regular Parisians to view the world in a slightly different way, cheaply and easily.

Degas was clearly influenced by these developments in photography. Long exposures in early photographs created fluid movement and gracefully blurred images. Relatively short exposure times captured the moment and caught composition unawares. The shutter apprehended the subjects without warning and arrested the unnoticed details.

Degas sort to recreate this effect by softening his paintings and using a limited pastel colour range. His framing, his composition is so clearly photographic. Look at his cropping of his subjects allowing for a more dynamic composition, a more intimate composition, creating the illusion that a larger scene beyond the frame was going on.

Degas is a humanist but he is also a storyteller, a master storyteller. He commands us to join him in the delight of the situation, see how he is calling us into the picture, see how easily the eye drifts from the bottom left to the top right aided so fluently by the strong diagonal of the wall.

A master too at atmosphere, the gentle light coming from the windows in the background, soft natural shadows, the muted pastel colours, a range of emotions and a variety of personal circumstances. His heart is clearly in it . . .

The heart is an instrument that goes rusty if it
is not constantly used.It is not possible to be
a heartless artist.

Degas is also a master composer. He paints what he wants to see . What he considers important, vital. His compositions are a dynamic amalgam of individual drawings that fill his sketchbooks. When brought together they create structures so full of life, so full of humanity

Degas was regarded as a central member of the Impressionist school of painting, their work was loose, sometimes rough, imprecise, created rapidly, largely outdoors. He may have been one of the gang but his paintings are far from impressionistic , his are so different from them in style and in approach. He was strict, he was detailed, his brush work was precise, his line was definitive. He was not an impressionist, perhaps a detailist.

I have tried to follow in Degas’s footsteps in photographs. I have tried to borrow his style, his composition, his story telling, his widescreen format, his detail in composition, the stuff going on outside of the frame.

Not ballet dances, but builders and baseball.

Figures in a space.