Blog Post #4

This drawing is by Georges Seurat and was done in 1884 with Conte crayon.  It is called A Woman Fishing.  This drawing stood out to me because it is so simple but it is almost impossible to mistake what it is.  There aren’t any contour lines and there is basically no detail at all.  The figure is only outlined by where the shading stops but there is still an incredible amount of information that is given.  There is only a small variation in shading on the head and face but you can still tell where the head or neck starts and the dress stops and you can also tell where the face stops and the hair starts under the hat.   It looks like there is some cross hatching done on the lady’s hat and some around the edges of the piece but for the most part the shading is very smoothly done and does a great job of telling the viewer what they are looking at.  The use of implied lines and shapes is also present.  There is almost no difference in shade from the face to the background shading/negative space around it but your eye closes off the space the positive space from the negative.  The same thing happens around her feet.  There is very little change in shade from where her dress ends to the shading of the “ground” but you are able to tell where her dress ends and the ground begins because there is an implied line from the front of her dress to where her shadow begins and this lets serves as the boundary between the lady and her surroundings.  Works like this really stand out to me because it could very easily be just a dark blob in  the middle of some slightly lighter blobs, but it isn’t it’s a woman fishing.