My artwork is a series of images showing three different dance poses expressing the feeling I have when I dance. The series presents a positive feeling of happiness and excitement with big bright colours that blend together with ease. My concept is dance and capturing movement and then expressing it with the use of negative space that creates the dancer’s pose. The title of my artwork is ‘Movement and Expression’ as both movement and expression are the main elements of dance.
The most prominent principle in my artwork is rhythm as the blending of the colours shows rhythm and flow. Dance is also connected to music and therefore rhythm. The form of media my artwork was made from is photography. I had a photo shoot to capture images of myself first and then transferred them into a series of paintings. I used watercolour paints to create my artwork as it would be the most effective in causing the blending effect I wanted.
The process I used was to print the images from the photoshoot out and put them on the light box with card paper over the top. Using watercolours, I outlined the dancer then blended the colours together. This was a great technique as all three paintings expressed the flow of movement. The famous artist Edgar Degas inspired my artwork because of the way he can execute a dancer’s body and its shape through paintings. His dancer based artworks inspired the way I posed and then painted my body as a dancer to define elongated features and unique shapes and lines. My artwork expresses the personal link I have to dance and the feeling it creates when I move. It shares a positive experience I have in my life and something I wish more people could understand.
The emotions I tried to show throughout my artwork was joy and excitement of the feeling of dancing and moving your body. I believe this was expressed as a result of the colours and tones of the painting. My goal as an artist was to create an artwork that makes me feel the same way I feel when I dance. I wanted the feeling of joy and excitement to carry from the painting into the audience. This artwork helped me to achieve this goal as it projects the feelings I have when I dance so that others can experience them as well.
When creating this artwork, I learnt that movement and expression are the main concepts in dance and they can be expressed through paintings. I also learnt that an artwork can project and express a certain feeling or emotion onto its audience. My final artwork is exactly how I imagined and envisioned it when planning for it. The way the colours blended together causes such an intriguing image and the negative space in the shape of the dancer looks so defined.
This piece will influence my future artworks as it provides a strong meaning behind it. In future, I would like to carry that on to my pieces and make them significant and relevant to my life and others. I will also use the watercolour blending and negative space techniques in future artworks because of their success in this one.
