dancer with green eyelid



2007
oil & acrylic on canvas
30 x 24"
76 x 61cm

I see my ballet paintings as portraits of a fellow artist, although from a vastly different artform. Painters and dancers are both wordless visual communicators but they have little else in common. To begin with, painters are observers and dancers are performers. Figure painters express themselves through depictions of the body while dancers employ the body itself. Dancers, if anything, are the ultimate physical storytellers. While the act of painting typically requires no more than the use of a single hand, dancing strains every limb, muscle, and bone. One artform is practiced privately, stroke upon stroke, usually over the course of several sessions and retouchings, while the other is played out publicly and instantaneously, in real time, irreversible and open to immediate scrutiny.