Degas Plus One

In my previous post, Cezanne Plus One, I discussed an altered sketch I made from a small Cezanne painting of bathers. Turning my notebook page to another sketch made in the same museum, I found another opportunity for revision and completion. The sketch was a series of Degas studies of dancers cast in bronze. They didn’t quite fill the page with this obvious blank area in the lower right. To fill the hole I used a study I had made myself of a young dancer. The background was then filled in with frenetic pastel and charcoal marks, making this one of my more wild and wooly works.