Three Dancers 1906

Edgar Degas made this pastel drawing of Three Dancers sometime in his career, capturing a moment backstage. You can almost feel him capturing a fleeting image, fixing it to the paper. I can imagine him there, charcoal or pastel in hand, smudging the colours—ochre, red, green, and blue. It is easy to sense Degas’s own energy, and also that of the dancers as he worked. He’s trying to catch them in movement, but they’re like these unreal figures, smudged and blurred at the edges. It's like they are caught in a state of constant becoming, never quite resolving into a fixed image. Maybe Degas was interested in how the colours of the tutus blurred into the background. How the eye struggles to find form in all that chaos. He’s showing us how it feels to see, not just what to see. That’s what painting is, right? A conversation across time, where we all inspire each other to see the world in new ways.