Dance Inspiration

As an artist, I always aspire to do something that has never been done before. You know how it is.....you come up with something you think is so friggin' cool and you start doing it then you pick up a magazine and see 'your' technique. Sometimes I think there is nothing that is truly new. There must certainly be a collective creative vein that runs subconscious throughout every artistic community. Thus what you think is 'yours' has actually been done by tons of people for hundreds of years and, although it will be changed slightly and deemed 'new', it is still very much the same.

Luckily, since we are all individuals with our own specific DNA codes, whatever we do IS precisely ours and no one could ever do it the same way. That is the magic of it all.



So why did I title this blog post about Dance? Well, I continue to be amazed by the dance scene. It seems there are people discovering new things all the time. Hence this dance called Jerking. If you click on the link, you will see a slide show by the NY Times that explains the street gang origins of this young dance. Is it really new? I don't know and I don't really care. I mainly admire the ingenuity of these street kids and am influenced by their spontaneity and energy, just as I am influenced by anything r-a-w. Graffiti for instance. Love it!! And I am certainly not the first to explore it.

Here are a couple of my new pieces, graffiti and dance and bird inspired. My obsession with spray paint continues, as you can see. I built up the texture with tissue paper, not the way you might think, but I got really goopy with it, made snakes with tissue and gel medium. I especially like the family piece.

ps.....if you like these stencils, you can get them here from the fabulous Ginny Carter Smallenburg.