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.
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.
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.
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.
Indeed, given the emotional responses here and references to birth death and joy it sounds a lot like Flamenco dance.
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.
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”.*
“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.
Maybe that book helped make me what I am today. 
