Getting Started

#6

#5

First, drawing on gray pastel paper, I just imagined Maenads filling the space. [5] Then I imagined the dance coming out of a field into a clearing, with the exhausted reclining dancers in the foreground.[6]

#8

#7

After making the first sketches, I found dancers who were willing to take these poses, first for drawings and then for slides. Sophia,  a dancer spending a year at Judson Church, and  Julio, a ballet dancer, were the models who made these fantasies come alive.[7,8]
After some drawings, slides of these poses were projected onto a full size (60″X40″) paper with a perspective grid drawn on the ground plane. [9] For both the drawings and slides of individual figures, a one-foot rule was included so that the figure could be placed on the grid  at correct perspective distance: the foot rule was fitted to the width of a one-foot space on the grid.

#9

#10

#11

Roughing in the darks, [10] I could see that the dancing pair on the left is too far forward and the middle of the composition is empty — I had been paying too much attention to the pile-up of  exhausted figures in the foreground.  Sophia had gone  back to Portugal, so with the help of a new model, Rainbow,  I moved the dancing pair back, and put another figure, posed by Rainbow, at their feet [11]. The pastel drawing for this new figure, between dancing and prone exhaustion,  helped me to think about other changes. Cutting and pasting the paper to make room is a little like choreography, and I realize I am working with the experience of these models as dancers and actors.[12].

#12

#13

The head of the dancer on the left needed to turn into the painting [13], and a new figure was needed to connect the foreground to the Dionysos. It should be a hailing, greeting figure, not the  dark one leaning on her thyrsos staff that is now in the center of the composition.

#14

#15

Rainbow had ideas for all these changes. In fact,  the pastel drawing  of Rainbow hailing the god [14] as he advances was a beginning of the connection between the  foreground and the dancers in the field. I decided to move her to the center. She reminds me of  Wyeth’s “Christina’s World” , another girl gazing into a field.  I made a small  (10”X17”) watercolor study to get an idea of the effect of color and shadow on these figures. [15]

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