Gestural Dancers, Once Again

The box of dance sketches is almost finished. I have been finding creative ways of finishing these with inks and charcoals. The ink brush that I am using is the tradition mao bi that Chinese calligraphers use. Mine is a very fine hu kai brush, which makes a variety of marks in a broad range of thick and thin.  The drawing below was based upon a study of a modern dance with ordinary bed sheets.

The Chinese mao bi makes such fluid calligraphic marks so reminiscent of my days training as a Chinese calligrapher, I decided to paint some of my studies of dancers as if they were a page of characters. Hence the name for this piece below, Characters. The word "character," here can refer both to types of people and also Chinese words. (Chinese symbols are refered to as "characters"). In this piece, I have used familiar brush work found in zhuan, xing,grass, and kai styles. Even the arrangement of the figures on the page has a kinship with how some works of Chinese calligraphy alternate large, heavy forms, with lyrical, wispy ones. I often recall how some calligraphers made the first character very prominent, almost akin to the medieval capital that western artists might be familiar with in illuminated manuscripts.

Some of my work became increasingly abstract, with the dancers barely recognizable.

The last ink and charcoal drawing featured men dancing in tuxedos. I decided to add something just terrifying on this one - five nooses! I had been reading about the Salem witchcraft trial and the five "witches" that were hung. Interestingly, I did not get many "likes" when I posted this work on social media.  I wonder why?

What followed were ink drawings literally scraped from the bottom of the barrel, or in this case, the dregs of the box.  There were a number of tiny scraps of paper that I almost threw away but did not. I did not erase the accidental drop of ink that looks to be a projectile that the hapless man at left is futilely trying to stop.