Mating Dance

70 x 50 cm Acrylic on Canvas

Patterns and Beats

70 x 50 cm
Acrylic on Canvas

Not Too Old To Learn

100 x 76 cm
Acrylic, Mixed Media on Canvas
SOLD

Rumba Aspiration

100 x 76 cm
Acrylic on Canvas

Shy Bird

70 x 50 cm
Acrylic on Canvas

Waltz

100 x 50 cm
Acrylic, Mixed Media on Canvas

Dance first. Think later.

Dance has always been an instinctively joyful activity for me, something to do when the mood takes me. At heart I’ve always been more of a kitchen dancer.

Then came a time when I felt that I should expand my repertoire and that some dance classes were in order.

Over the years I’ve attended several dance classes in a variety of styles and also entered the strange and alien world of formal and partner dancing.

I became preoccupied with the question of ‘How does one learn to dance?’ The paintings explore the tension between wanting to get up and dance instinctively, with all its joys and limitations and engaging with formal dance steps and routines to expand my repertoire. The feeling that in order to think about the dance routines means almost subverting what comes naturally to me is encapsulated in the familiar quote above, taken from a Samuel Beckett play.

In my own teaching I have found the VAK (Visual-Auditory-Kinaesthetic) learning styles preferences very helpful with learners. In my paintings I also explore my own preferred learning styles of Visual-Kinaesthetic while struggling with my less dominant auditory sense which dance seems to rely on so much. The collision of sensory preferences adds to the vexation and tension and highlights that one size doesn’t fit all when learning a new skill.

In these paintings I freestyle visually, moving between representation, abstraction, semi-abstraction and other forms of visual communication.