Degas
Ink and digital illustration to accompany an essay about Edgar Degas called “I Never Loved the Ballerinas.”

Degas was never my favorite Impressionist. I had long put him in a column I labeled "ballerina art," and this was not a compliment. I had seen plenty of his ballerinas in museum fly-bys, and grudgingly accepted that his rendering was beautiful. But I felt put off by the too-pretty subjects and what I have learned about the brutality of their training. Any good feeling I have about ballet is limited to my pride that, five decades after taking classes at Gina Saunders' Dance Studio, I can still assume positions one through five in my kitchen while the vegetables cook.

But I never truly paid the ballerinas sufficient attention. That's the trouble with museum fly-bys. It's easy to treat the experience like checking off boxes in the seen-it column with no thought further than whether we liked it. Read more.