I painted this small canvas in a makeshift garage / studio in bowral, nsw, newly re-married. Under garage neon lights beside the cottage, I called on a past theme with which I felt safe ..... the person dancing alone. Though the dancer is a woman, it was me doing this dance ...... as is the case with all the work in this series.... The painting was made on a peasant belgian linen, with a tooth to it, and I loved working the paint into it's weave...... the clothing peg was the last move, .... it just happened, and am glad of it.

This small painting was made in an old tractor shed, and i used the last shred of linen canvas for its flirting form. A woman dancing alone on her verandah .... It was painted not long before i evacuated the coastal/big city conversation of massive importance.... A delicate piece in an indelicate world.

I look back at this series of dance paintings with affection. There are some not included here because i do not have images of them.

Here there is a quiet womblike sense of safe solitude accompanied by a tightrope walk in the way the marks are laid down. This dichotomy can be seen in a lot of my work but is particularly clear in this one, I reckon.

This one, as you can see from the other one's in this series, is almost a template. But it was quite an adventure. it started off with that ground of green... hmmm .. gently, gently, i built a dancer in that ground. finally, after so many deeps of subtle manouevres with this one, i remained in displeasure. one night , my younger brother rolled up to the old railway station studio, and began to hand me tubes of paint to use on this work. It all happened quickly, but this huge, fat slug of red angled paint squeezed through the painting. [my brother and i were very close collaborators in many areas]. Anyway, it hung simultaeously like a question and an exclamation mark then .... even bringing shattered tears to one friend at the time... 'how could you destroy such feeling by that red ??' That is the difficult stuff of attempting to make meaning in images.