So You Think You Can Dance

I just got back from teaching a wonderful workshop for the West Virginia Watercolor Society. The classes enthusiasm over making a "flip book" astounded me. They are sure to continue their quest for the perfect samples of color and design strategies. These DO take your paintings to a new level.

Then we discussed content. This was new to some of the class, and exciting to all. How do you put more of yourself into a painting? How do you get some ideas peculating in what used to be "just a pretty picture?"

While this concept may have been new to painting for some artists, they understand content when it applies to other forms of art.

The last night my wonderful hosts and I watched "So You Think you can Dance" (Is that the title? I'm not a TV watcher.) Anyway, the criticism of the dancers was light and nice, but it centered around two things. Evan evoked the style of Fred Astair--sweet and old-fashioned--like most of our paintings. He and his partner found it hard to really express themselves with this style. In painting we might say that the technique dominated the painting. And the artists personality and emotions couldn't show through.

While struggling with content in our paintings these quandaries that the dancers faced was obvious to average people. The judges even complimented one corriographer for daring to create a "conceptual" piece for the competition so near it's end. Another corrieographer created a dance that he thought would be "Popular" with the voting audience. I don't know the results of the voting. did Evan's popular work win? Please let me know.