Studieblad met twee naakte vrouwen 1904

This drawing of two nude women was made by Henri Fantin-Latour, probably in the late 1800’s. What interests me is the immediacy of the image. These aren’t highly rendered academic figures. Look at how Fantin-Latour allows the figures to emerge from a mass of scribbled marks. The pencil lines are allowed to be themselves, chaotic and searching. There’s very little shading, just a concentration of marks to suggest tone, and the figures are set against a blank ground. There’s a real sense of energy and liveliness to these marks, and I find myself thinking about Rodin's drawings, where the expressive line is all. Both artists are interested in the body and form as something unfixed and dynamic, rather than idealised or static. For both artists drawing is a process of feeling and becoming. The drawing embraces ambiguity and multiple interpretations over fixed or definitive meanings.