Dance

I have recently completed a series of five paintings inspired by Swan Lake performed by Birmingham Royal Ballet. An artist friend commented that this was an interesting departure from my more recent work inspired by live music performance. Previous to the Swan Lake series I had just completed twelve paintings from my Artist-in-Residence at The Great British Rhythm and Blues Festival. Whilst I acknowledge that the Swan Lake paintings are a departure from the Blues I also consider them to be similar in some respects in that they are also an attempt to express live stage performance.

This set me thinking about a comment from a different artist friend who on seeing my live music inspired paintings remarked that he remembered that as an under-graduate I had produced a series of works based on dancers in a nightclub. He felt that there were similarities between the nightclub lighting and the stage lighting in the music inspired paintings. So perhaps there is a common theme running through all these works. The nightclub series included dry-point, mono-print, acrylic and oil painting. The large oil on board hung in my dining room for a few years but it met a fatal end many years ago. The two small acrylic paintings have lay in drawers unseen along with the mono-prints for over 40 years. They were based on live sketches (now lost) that I did in a Sheffield nightclub called “Genevieve’s”. A fellow undergraduate and I sat in the nightclub over the course of about a week, sketching clubbers on the dance-floor. Perhaps it is time to air the mono-prints (all dated on the back “Feb 1980”!) in public for the first time (digitally at least)…so here they are: