These Stunning Images Inspired by Degas' Famed Ballerina Paintings Actually Started as Second Life Screenshots

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

I saw Scylla Rhiadra’s stunning "The Dancer VII: Les coulisses" and immediately recognized it as an homage to Edgar Degas and his series of paintings of dancers. Scylla doesn’t just focus on the same subject matter, she captures his use of light. (I have written about her facility with light in 2020 and 2021.) 

She has a fascination with light and shadow that reflects Degas' own. I love how she makes her work seem like a painting you could find at The Louvre. I asked her about her project and about how she creates her painterly effect. Her answer was so well done, I decided to just turn the rest of the column over to her and get out of the way:

I enjoy dancing, in both RL and SL (I’m better at it in the latter), and I have produced more than a few images on the subject, but I also like the way that dance, and most supremely ballet, transforms the human body into kinetic art comprised of shapes in motion, without losing the "human" that is defined by that body. It is also sometimes one of the more complicated and interesting ways through which we connect with one another, whether it is through a choreographed dance performed together, or expressed more intimately through romantic or sexually-charged couples dancing.

For the rest of Scylla’s story, click on:

So it’s perhaps not surprising that I am attracted to Degas, and especially to his representations of the ballet company at the Paris Opéra. I also admire the way his paintings so often tell through subtle touches a miniature story, and I love the brilliant way he captures expression, emotion, and character in faces that are often not painted in minute detail. And his handling of light is, of course, astonishing. I’ve tried to reproduce, in a poor way, some of these in my own images referencing his oeuvre.

Speaking of “Le coulisses,” it’s worth noting a few thematic elements that are reflected both in composition and in the post-processing of the image. The ballet school at the Paris Opéra included a great many girls, often very young, from impoverished backgrounds. Marie van Goethem, the subject of Degas’s sculpture “La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans,” was in fact only 13 when she first joined the Paris Opéra Ballet, and began appearing in his paintings; her background was one of hardship and poverty. 

As I’ve noted, I’ve tried to capture in their faces and positioning within the composition something of the complicated community that must have developed around these young girls, but I’ve also added to this picture, and two others in the series, a detail that Degas himself included in his photos.

Subscribers to the Paris Opéra Ballet – les abonnés – were permitted to attend rehearsals and practices, where they could ogle the girls in their short skirts and tight-fitting leotards: you’ll find a number of such figures in Degas’s paintings (see for instance his 1874 “Répétition d'un ballet sur la scène”). Moreover, there seems to have been a busy trade in “sexual favors” with these men: impoverished girls needed the additional income to survive, and there was a perception that pandering to the desires of les abonnés was the surest path to advancement in the company. 

I’ve tried to capture something of this unsavory reality with the addition of a shadowy male figure deliberately positioned in the margins of some of the images: he can be seen between scenic flats in “Les coulisses,” watching the girls. I find the relationship between the incredible beauty of the art produced – both dance, and painting – and the ugliness of the underlying reality (both slightly concealed but subtly evoked by Degas) fascinating.

See Scylla's entire stunning series in the gallery above.

Tomorrow, we'll look at how she turned Second Life screenshots into images like these!

All images copyright Scylla Rhiadra

See all of Cajsa's Choices here. Follow Cajsa on Flickr, on Twitter, and on her blog.

Cajsa’s Amazon Wish List page is here.

Suggest images and Flickr feeds to Cajsa: Cajsa’s Choices is devoted to unique, artistic, and innovative virtual world-based images and screenshots that showcase the medium as an art form and Second Life as a creative platform. (Generally not images that fit on this Bingo card.) To recommend the best in virtual world imagery, tag the picture with #CasjaNWN or tag Cajsa Lilliehook by adding her to the photo.

Comments

[Valentina Kendal]

Scylla's use of light in her SL photos never ceases to awe me. She's one of my favorite SL photographers.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

@Valentina -- Thank you for your very kind words, Valentina! I shall walk with a little extra spring in my step now!

@Cajsa -- And thank you for this, and for your really generous appraisal! This was a remarkably fun series to produce, and it's an unlooked-for bonus that people have enjoyed it!