Image manipulation

These two nudes found their way on to one sheet of paper, showing how artists manipulated images millennia before computer whizzes resized, altered and pasted them on screens. In both images on the page, I portray the same model, and so the impossible is laid out before our eyes. It has been shown that Degas used the same method to place dancers originally drawn individually in his studio into groups. In fact, just about all groupings in historic art were produced in the same way. An individual (human, animal) was drawn in the studio, either directly into the group-work, or resized and added to it. You can be sure that Rubens did not gather the family of Jan Breughel the Elder into his studio to paint them all at once. Nor did Botticelli happen upon beautiful, blonde, identical quintuplets in the streets of Florence and invite them to pose for La Primavera. In this way, historic art was closer to drama or masque or tableau than to photography. The artist, in turn, was closer to a magician or conjuror, as he not only created images, but manipulated them. In the virtual worlds conjured digitally today such manipulation is anonymous and routine. In the case of my drawing, it was originally a way to save paper before I noticed its aesthetic appeal. Shame about the missing left hand.