Flapper Silk

I had a fabulous gig on Saturday night. The Go-Go dance group the 2-3s asked me to come dance with them for the Moonlight and Magnolia's benefit for the American Cancer Society at Zen in downtown Greenville.

flapper resist lines

Of course,  I was thrilled to get to dance with these women for a variety of reasons. The first being that they are all beautiful, super cool girls who I'm lucky to count as some of my first friends in a new city...the second being that my mother is a breast cancer survivor and since I am not yet monetarily capable of supporting charities that I believe in, I am always thrilled to find other ways to donate my time and talents for a good cause...and the third being the fact that I got to go dancing, and I've never found a dance floor that I didn't like!

The event was a wonderful time, and I hope that it marked the first of many events that I get to participate in with the 2-3s. Also, I became inspired by the women I was with and my love of dance to begin work on a new series of silk paintings.

I'm a silk painting fool

Though I have played with dance and the female form in quite a few of my silk paintings, I have kept the figures mostly unadorned and very general. This series is going to celebrate dance by representing specific dance styles through costuming.

The first piece I decided to work on is a direct result of Saturday night. One of the girls wore a beautiful white fringe flapper style dress. The movement of the fringe while she danced was absolutely mesmerizing, so I decided to begin this series with "The Flapper"

I did a preliminary sketch for this one - from memory and my imagination. I decided to keep the face and body general but to really increase the detail on the ornamentation: her dress and hair piece.

Flapper with background started

I chose washes of black and water for the dress and feathers to give the impression of movement, and I went pink and purple on her body with pink, purple, gray, and blue bubbles behind her.

I used a variety of green, blue-green, and yellow washes and mixed them liberally with water both on and off of the silk in order to achieve a patchy sort of grass looking base. I mixed cyan, dark blue, and black to achieve a bold background for the sky, and I faded that into a gray-blue top section.

I'm thrilled with this piece. I also finished a set of modified shibori style scarves today, and I'm impatiently waiting for them all to dry so that I can take the finished flapper off of the stretcher and start on my next dancer. More soon!

fin