Invented Dancer Figure

'Dancing Through Fire'

8”X11” Graphite on Paper. I named this one ‘Dancing through Fire’. I started it while listening to the lyrics of a song I heard on the radio earlier that day. It was a pop song about self-empowerment, but the visual image of a dancer dancing amidst flames ignited my imagination and I grabbed my sketchbook and drew a sketch of how such figure might be.

Her body posture must reflect the nature of the flames; a wild, selfish, free force reaching up for oxygen but grounded to the ground where it begins.

It needed to be uninhibited and in full force of motion.
When I was done with the figure I added shackles, which I did not initially have in mind. The pose seemed powerful and she needed to be grounded, like the flames. A powerful force ignoring its external bonds.

It stands in my mind as a symbol of life amidst difficulties; a dance as a response to shackles, saying that one’s spirit cannot be bound.

 

I started with the gesture, then general volumes, then anatomy and lastly all the values (the lights and darks) had to be figured out. That was the most challenging part, to imagine a light source and how this light source would influence a figure, how to arrange it all to make the figure stand out and still allow it to have dimensionality (rather than being 2 dimensional).

It was a difficult mental exercise but satisfying nonetheless.