Weathered Souls

At first I had a very hard time deciding what I wanted the focus of this work to be. A few years prior, I was taking a dance class with a unit in ballet. I was thinking back to that class and how we all stood in a line preforming a routine designed to help us practice our pirouettes and other basic ballet moves. Just a short bit of choreography that we would repeat over and over again while standing in one spot until the end of a song. The memory of watching the class in the mirror, all in rows repeating the same thing in unison, gave me the inspiration I was seeking for “ Weathered Souls”.

I decided to paint rows of warn and faded Ballet slippers to represent what I remember of that dance class. It was a full class made up of a few with varying degrees of previous Ballet experience, but most of us were really only just beginning our dancing journey’s. I decided to represent some of the slippers as worn out to represent the experienced dancers, the others I left with very little detail and colour to represent the inexperience of the rest of us. For me, Ballet was a new experience, a hardly touched canvas that had so much potential to be exciting and challenging, or boring, distended to become another dropped hobby.