Ovid's "The Art of Love" ("L'art d'aimer" d'Ovide) 1935

This drawing after Ovid's "The Art of Love" is by Aristide Maillol, and it’s been created with red chalk. I imagine Maillol standing at his easel, the chalk in hand moving across the page, feeling his way through the contours of the figure. You know, drawing is a real dance, a kind of call and response between the artist and the subject. I picture Maillol’s gaze shifting back and forth, from the model to the paper, trying to capture the essence of the body's form and weight. The red chalk is a lovely choice; it gives the figure a warm, earthy quality, like a terracotta sculpture come to life. The marks are confident, assured, yet there’s a softness too, a sensitivity to the curves and planes of the body. Maillol really gets how to convey the weight and volume of a body with just a few lines. Artists look at each other's works across time, drawing inspiration and riffing off of each other. It’s like one big conversation. There are so many ways of seeing and experiencing the world, and paintings like this help us see it anew.