Dancers 1901

Edgar Degas captured these dancers sometime during his career, using pastel. Look at the surfaces, the way the pastel is layered. See that flurry of marks, like he was trying to catch a breeze? It's less about perfection and more about capturing the feeling of movement, the weightlessness of a ballerina. The color palette is muted, dominated by earth tones and pale hues, with touches of contrasting blue, the tulle skirts feel ethereal. Degas doesn't hide his process. You can see the individual strokes, the smudges, the erasures. It's like he's inviting us into his studio, showing us how he builds up the image, layer by layer. There’s a kinship with someone like Manet, in that they both sought to capture a sense of immediacy, or intimacy and modern life. What's left unsaid is often more interesting than what's explicitly defined. It's in that ambiguity that the magic happens.