Because She Dances…
#53/365 Paintings
The Dancer
Behold the brand of beauty tossed!
See how the motion does dilate the flame!
…Fire, to no place confined,
Is both our wonder and our fear;
Moving the mind,
As lightning hurled through air…
Excerpts from “The Dancer” by Edmund Waller
…………………
I have always felt the dancer creates a new character at play with each motion. Even the stage is a character. A whole society is at work. With each whoosh there is an echo from the human condition. Pain, neutrality, anguish, ecstasy, lightness of being, disappointment, heartbreak, a new beginning, another death. You name it, it’s all there in every smokey move—clear as the light around her that shape the prayer of the dance.
Often, I am awake and writing at 4 a.m. when your paintings arrive. I consider each one a message from the universe that is conspiring to break me open to beauty. This image embodies a code I am trying to crack in my own life — a return to the joys and power of the body. I stepped aside of mine a long time ago. I am going to keep this “motion that dilates the flame” close, as my call back to the wild wonders of the dance.
Sage, you are a wise and brilliant woman. I love how you meditate on new understanding no matter what is occurring in your life, your body and heart. I seem to painting these images for the same reason. To keep beauty healthy and alive daily. And to learn from each image.
Sage’s comments are getting to be one of the good features of this blog, in addition to the art and the stories.
This image was interesting because in the white/dark I saw something else, like the kind of mask one might see at an Indian pueblo dance. So you have a couple of motifs of dance embedded in this.
WM: Isn’t she just amazing – that Sage! I love her like crazy. ; )
… by the way, someone else said that your comments had the same effect. You really see things so differently. It’s refreshing to me. I learn from you. Thank you.
WM: Honored to be in The Chorus of Niya with you! It’s a triple-blessing to see Niya’s work, read her stories, take my own little journey, and then travel through the refractions of what you (and all of us here) see / feel through each painting.
This is one of your very most wow-some images; faint with the underlying breath of deeply magical strokes of paint, as if you imagined some fantastic scene that now comes across to us as a potent dream image. Fantastical Niya, truly dream borne energy given wings by your talent.
Laurel, wow. Thank you so much. It warms my heart like crazy when any of my paintings/works comes hits the mark for people (in a subjective way of course).
THANK YOU!