Brogan Hendry

Cleveland College of Art & Design

Ballet dancers are strong, powerful, flexible performance artists. Their exacting
discipline and weightless elegance push the human body to its physical limits, and
yet depicts an outward appearance of graceful beauty and control. My concept was
to express this using a fluid, sparse and expressive figure against a dominant back
drop inspired by grand and regal theatres dancers perform with in. I simplified the
figure down to highlight their structure and strength, whilst keeping the movement of
the costumes free and using vivid shades of oranges and reds to express the flamboyancy
of dance and the passion the dancer feels for there art. By keeping the torso fluid
the dancer inherits the connotations of water: with it’s constant movement, relentless
speed and unforgiving disrespect for limitations and in contrast the Dickensian flock
pattern was inspired by the gold gilding decoration used in many ornate theatres, with
it’s rigidity and exacting repetitious structure against the free abstracted lines of the
ballerina....tradition meets contemporary, with seamless elegance!

Theme: Flexibility
Medium: Mixed media on canvas