Standing Female Nude 1875 - 1934

Isaac Israels created this sketch of a standing female nude, using pencil on paper. The first thing I notice is the directness of the marks. It feels like Israels is thinking through the pencil, each line a kind of question. The body is built up from a mesh of hatched marks, the pencil moving back and forth, mapping the planes of the figure. There's a real sense of process here, of the artist working to understand what he sees, and then showing us. Look at the way he renders the shadows, not with smooth shading, but with these active, searching lines. It reminds me a little of Rodin's drawings, that same sense of the figure emerging from a cloud of marks. It’s like Israels is not just describing the body, but also the very act of looking, of trying to capture something fleeting and alive. Art doesn't have to be about answers, sometimes it's more about the questions we ask along the way.