Some cool dance images:

Couples Dancing

Image by Chris Murtagh
This one is a bit of a different one I suppose. Originally I was inspired by a painting in the background on a tv show, which was pretty minimal, a block of one colour with, a repeated pattern on top, of circle-ish things of another colour. Similar to a floral wall paper design or something. Then I thought why not make them people, do an over head shot of people moving in a crowd, a bar, sporting event. Me and Vera were going to dance lessons for our first dance so I thought why not make them couples dancing.

At first I wanted to keep it to two colours, one for the people and one for the background. I did try. Then I realised couples dancing from overhead looks pretty boring, so I decided to show kind of ghosts of the movement they were doing, so black would be the first moment, then green in the middle and white the last movement. This is a method I believe the Vorticist painters used around the start of the twentieth century. Not something I’ve ever been interested in or particularly liked before, but I vaguely remember some paintings of people going down stairs or whatever, with the actions laid on top of each other. Dance is all movement, and I guess this is the best way to describe movement. Also it’s used a fair bit in cartoons and comic books.

This painting is pretty loose and is not that concerned with accurately showing the people or even sticking to it’s own rules. I hope that what I’m trying to do comes across, but it doesn’t matter that much. It’s a solid ok painting. Also I like a bit of orange, a few people are pretty down on the orange, to me it seems to blend with most things, it’s very brash, but then it’s also very weak and see through. I ended up putting a lot more colours into the picture than I originally planned, I couldn’t really resist it. I like the depth of the blending colours and carving around and into the figures with some of the heavy colours of the background.

www.chrismurtagh.co.uk/art/dancing-couples/

buy print : society6.com/Chris_Murtagh/Couples-Dancing_Print

Jazz Dance Studio (Parma)

Image by teo_ladodicivideo