Dansende pige 1902

This print of a dancing girl was made by Carl Thomsen, presumably at the turn of the 20th Century. Can you imagine Thomsen working on this, the cross-hatching, the tiny marks building up this figure so delicately? She could be a Degas dancer, if Degas had been into softer lines, or if he was danish! What’s she thinking, this girl? Is she a performer? Or just dancing for herself, lost in a world of feeling, moving her body to get those feelings out? There's this scarf, or maybe it's just a bit of sheer fabric, floating around her arms. It makes me think of other artists using fabric as a way to move the eye, to create a sense of rhythm and flow. Painters are always in conversation with each other, whether they know it or not. Each brushstroke, each line, is a response to something that came before, a way of keeping the conversation going.