Oscar Romp"Very interesting and impressive." |
Northern Soul ReprisedThese images were made between the years of '96-'06. Most of them have never been shown publicly. ![]() Dance, in whatever form, is about "drawing with the body". My love of music and dancing prompt me to draw human figures in actual activity, in real situations, where I can explore the figure in movement within the context of a dance club. I cannot make music, but I can draw dancers dancing to music. I can suggest and inform the kind of music being played by the rhythms, tones, and energy through the marks I make and my choreographed depiction of the dancers and their physicality. ![]() They are, for me, a natural subject for drawing or painting. The resulting pictures are not just about visually recording dance moves, but about evoking the texture of the experience: the atmosphere, excitement and cultural rituals of the dance event where, it seems, ordinary life is left suspended. Whilst the dance floor lights move in a harsh directional way, the moving figures are glimpsed fleetingly, sometimes jumping into light like shooting stars, shedding light, and yet others appear as looming shadows. ![]() These figures are sketched notionally and tentatively at first, and are then reworked and strengthened with continued observation. I stop drawing and move to the dance floor — I dance, soaking up the energy from the music and then return to the picture with a refreshed eye. With the basics of the image established, I am now less tentative. Soon the picture takes on a life of its own, fed by the excitement and spirit of the music and the dance. ![]() These images that I create are depictions of a strange aspect of contemporary, urban life that is at once ancestral as well as modern — a metaphor for the miraculous energy of life itself. I have no belief in religion or in an after life as such; the meaning of life and the spirituality of it, have to be sought in the present, from the ordinary and the everyday, where each of us is a miracle. |