Dance me to the end of love

Finally free, the dancers have a ball

I wrote last time about the unexpected birth of my free dancers, about nine months after first looking at the sculptures of the Hoysala temples in South India. How I studied and copied and looked and remembered, and couldn’t work out what my response to them wanted to be. And how, in the end, they just sneaked onto a random sketchbook page one morning when I wasn’t paying attention and started running around, screaming with laughter.

Within a day or so they were running all over my sketchbooks, jumping on everything they could find.

Eventually they started playing around with boxes again (they had put themselves in architectural boxes when they first appeared).

I loved them so much that I collected them all together on a single sheet of A3.

They kept on experimenting...

At a certain point I tried to get them to go onto some canvas, so that we could start to make some ‘proper’ paintings.

But they started to stiffen up the minute they came out of the sketchbooks. When frustrated, make a collage…..

I tried using a brush directly onto the canvas, like my pen in the sketchbooks, with no planning or rough drawing first…

That was better, but I couldn’t see where it was going. This seems to have been a point where I might have benefitted from pushing further into this new ground and medium (though that would have been with my mind, right?) but I didn’t. I let them find their own way, somehow trusting to the idea that something was guiding this other than my badly-understood intentions. And so they carried on prancing around inside their boxes; pretending to be Atlas, invading my phone, running all over big sheets of sugar paper, expanding into full page spreads.

The dancers had been waiting many hundreds of years for me to finally come and find them. They were so grateful to have had their spirits revived before the sun crumbled them into dust, the wind unceremoniously dumping them on the temple compound floor.