Jane Hall’s Art of Dance

It is perhaps the hardest challenge for any artist – how to capture the spirit and movement of dance in paint? So it helps if the artist is also a dancer, as is the case with Norfolk-based artist, Jane Hall, whose popular series of ballroom and Latin American dance paintings are full of life, movement and vivid colour. She began the series shortly after starting ballroom dancing lessons under Diane MacKenzie and has since produced 12 pictures with a dance-related theme. These include a striking trio of Flamenco pictures, a sexy hot pink Cha Cha Cha painting and a graceful, elegant, flowing Waltz.

Jane explains: “As soon as I started ballroom dancing, it was inevitable I would end up using it as a theme for my work. I have always been fascinated by colour and movement and there’s so much of that in ballroom and Latin American dance – all those dazzling costumes and stylish poses make for perfect artistic subject matter. But the key thing for me was to make it seem modern, because I started this series before Strictly Come Dancing returned and made ballroom seem glamorous and popular again. So I chose bright, bold colours and a clean, elegant painting style to keep everything modern, vibrant and fresh.”

The pictures were completed over a period of 2 years, during which time Jane spent many hours watching ballroom dancers perform. “I spent a lot of time on the competition circuit,” she says, “and saw many of what are now the famous names perform, including Anton Du Beke and Erin Boag, James and Ola Jordan and Darren Bennett and Lilia Kopylova. I was doing lots of sketching at this point, trying to figure out what would be the best poses to use, because I was aiming to capture the very essence of each dance in just one picture. And that meant choosing something elegant and timeless for the waltz, something saucy and cheeky for the Cha Cha Cha and something dramatic, striking and angular for the Argentine Tango.”

Although watching the famous names perform was a big help to Jane in selecting her poses, she looked closer to home for her painting of the Jive. “That one’s based on me and my partner, Stephen,” she explains, “so you could call that one a sort of self-portrait.”

And what of the future? Will there be more dance pictures? “That’s a question I find quite hard to answer,” says Jane. “My ballroom teacher, Diane, passed away in January and we haven’t really done any dancing since then, although we’ll probably get back to it sometime in the future and that may inspire me to return to the theme. In the meantime, I’ve been turning my attention to paintings connected with the British seaside holiday – pictures of the ice creams, hot dogs, fish and chip shops and amusement arcades that are all around me in Great Yarmouth where I live. It’s a really fun subject and the work is going well, but putting my dance pictures together for my new website has reminded me just how much I loved painting them. In fact, an artist couldn’t ask for a better subject – dancing’s great to do and even better to paint.”

Jane Hall’s dance paintings can be viewed online at www.jane-hall.co.uk.

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