# Soliciting your first impressions on what you see in a figure in a woodcut **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [January 2, 2026, 9:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/soliciting-your-first-impressions-on-what-you-see-in-a-figure-in-a-woodcut/1026284 "2026-01-02T21:23:34Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 7\ **Page:** 7
**Author:** ![Darren\_Garrison](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darren_garrison/32/92_2.png) [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2026, 3:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/soliciting-your-first-impressions-on-what-you-see-in-a-figure-in-a-woodcut/1026284/121 "2026-01-07T03:35:43Z")
BTW, I assume this is carved as three seperate stamps? The woman is definitely stamped first. I’m _pretty_ sure the greenery was stamped second and the man stamped last, but it could be the opposite. ---
**Author:** ![puzzlegal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puzzlegal/32/3827_2.png) [@puzzlegal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puzzlegal)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2026, 5:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/soliciting-your-first-impressions-on-what-you-see-in-a-figure-in-a-woodcut/1026284/122 "2026-01-07T05:47:59Z")
I think they look joyous. I don’t think it’s meant to be a dance with death, i think it’s a dance celebrating life. ---
**Author:** ![RivkahChaya](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rivkahchaya/32/8919_2.png) [@RivkahChaya](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RivkahChaya)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2026, 10:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/soliciting-your-first-impressions-on-what-you-see-in-a-figure-in-a-woodcut/1026284/123 "2026-01-07T10:44:47Z")
> [@Kimstu](#): > > Even looks to me like there’s a little white dot of negative space representing a navel. Which is actually a mistake-- a pregnant woman’s navel should bulge, or at least be completely flat, but there’s never negative space. That fetus takes all the space it can get. ---
**Author:** ![RivkahChaya](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rivkahchaya/32/8919_2.png) [@RivkahChaya](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RivkahChaya)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2026, 11:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/soliciting-your-first-impressions-on-what-you-see-in-a-figure-in-a-woodcut/1026284/124 "2026-01-07T11:01:52Z")
> [@Just\_Asking\_Questions](#): > > Some artists really don’t like women, and either consciously or subconsciously it shows up in the art. We, not being misogynists, tend to give artist the benefit of the doubt, “he couldn’t really mean women have flies coming out their privates!”. But sometimes, they do. Yeah. That’s sort of what was trying to say earlier. And in reference to Alison Bechdel-- this requires some background, so bear with me till I get to the interesting part-- she once wrote that she has drawn all her life, and although as an art major in college, she did the landscapes, and still lifes, etc., but always aspired to cartoons, and drew then exclusively until she had to do the other pieces for school. She also said-- this is the interesting part-- that she drew mostly men, because she was uncomfortable drawing women, since he unconscious models were they hypersexualized women of the comics (or the desexualized hags). It wasn’t until she saw the work of a gay male artist who deliberately sexualized his figures for effect sometimes, that she said, instead of drawing a “woman,” why don’t I draw a “lesbian,” and that was her breakthrough. Since then she has almost exclusively drawn lesbians. She writes about this in her semi-autobiographical work, but she also discussed it in a lecture-demonstration. I have been fortunate to have met her several times, had a couple of conversations with her; attended two lectures, and one cartooning workshop; and once actually had her remember me from a previous encounter, and tell me she’d gotten hold of something and read it after I mentioned it. Anyway. My point is that if someone like her could have a mental block drawing women’s bodies, other people could as well. I can see someone not hating women’s bodies per se, but as an artist, hating drawing them. ---
**Author:** ![chela](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chela/32/21582_2.png) [@chela](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/chela)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2026, 11:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/soliciting-your-first-impressions-on-what-you-see-in-a-figure-in-a-woodcut/1026284/125 "2026-01-07T11:34:41Z")
> [@DSeid](#): > > Sometimes a dancing couple is just a dancing couple … Indeed, given the emotional responses here and references to birth death and joy it sounds a lot like Flamenco dance. ---
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2026, 2:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/soliciting-your-first-impressions-on-what-you-see-in-a-figure-in-a-woodcut/1026284/126 "2026-01-07T14:32:53Z")
> [@RivkahChaya](#): > > Which is actually a mistake-- a pregnant woman’s navel should bulge, or at least be completely flat, but there’s never negative space. That fetus takes all the space it can get. Sorry, I wasn’t clear. I meant that the white dot on the female figure’s belly is “negative space” in the art-term sense of remaining unpainted. Not that it necessarily indicates 3D **concavity**. I could see that white dot as representing a flat or convex navel. ---
**Author:** ![Jackmannii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jackmannii/32/311_2.png) [@Jackmannii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jackmannii)\ **Post date:** [January 10, 2026, 3:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/soliciting-your-first-impressions-on-what-you-see-in-a-figure-in-a-woodcut/1026284/127 "2026-01-10T03:51:04Z")
Seeing the OP reminded me of Lynd Ward images from the 1920s-30s. He did “novels” with the stories told entirely in woodcuts - no text. My parents’ library had a couple of them which I read when I was around 10. Spooky stuff for a child of that age, especially “God’s Man”.\* > **[Gods' Man](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gods%27_Man)** > > Gods' Man is a wordless novel by American artist Lynd Ward (1905–1985) published in 1929. In 139 captionless woodblock prints, it tells the Faustian story of an artist who signs away his soul for a magic paintbrush. Gods' Man was the first American wordless novel, and is considered a precursor of the graphic novel, whose development it influenced. > Ward first encountered the wordless novel with Frans Masereel's The Sun (1919) while studying art in Germany in 1926. He returned to the United S... “Madman’s Drum” was pretty creepy too. \*Ha, I see from the following passage in the Wikipedia article that I wasn’t alone in finding “God’s Man” disturbing. > [@](#): > > Psychiatrist M. Scott Peck objected strongly to the content of the book: he believed it had a destructive effect on children, and called it “the darkest, ugliest book [he] had ever seen”. Maybe that book helped make me what I am today. 😬 😱 [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/soliciting-your-first-impressions-on-what-you-see-in-a-figure-in-a-woodcut/1026284.md?page=6)