TIM BAKER

I really love to dance, and it’s one of the things I really missed during lockdown. The clubs have been closed for over a year now, and in a way it was like a church for me. I am only half-joking when I say that disco is my religion…dancing to music takes me out of myself in a way that not even art does. It’s a shamanistic, ancient ritual, nearly all cultures dance, and you can get into trance states when the music, your emotions, feelings and motion synchronise at once.

That yearning for the dancefloor must’ve entered my art, because I started drawing what I call ‘Dancing Abstracts’ – abtracts with moving figures or motion. I had gone through a literal ‘dark phase’ with my abstracts during Lockdown 2, the abstracts became a spider’s web of marks and darkness. Suddenly this lifted in January and I went totally the other way – with works getting lighter and using more white space. This started with Dancing Abstract 1:

Those figures go back to my childhood abstracts, the Klee like shapes I used to endlessly draw. But they are definitely dancing, and the warning signs, the hatted cross, the crossed out circle etc are pushed aside for a party!

Things got more frenetic in the second dancing abstract, leaping figures and arrows, spinning figures and moons, and are those windchimes or planets? My abstract seems to be breakdancing!

Then some triangles came to dance, they don’t move as fast but they had a cubist groove with the soundwaves, the staves and the treble clefs. I did intentionally put music score notation in this one. Again, I don’t usually draw with this, I think this was experiments with the early vintage flex fountain pens mentioned in the last post. I was experimenting with light soft gradations and very high-key work rather than my usual heavier style. I was indeed taking a line for a dance, or I suppose here more of a waltz as that’s 3/4 time, a very triangular tempo:

The next one is from March and wasn’t initially marked as part of this series, but looking again, given the motion, it definitely is part of this series. More binary opposition in this one, hence the name ‘Feminine / Masculine’ since it felt that the plant like curves forms were more feminine and the others more masculine. But they are definitely dancing together, a lot of motion here.

And finally the last piece so far in this series, Dancing Abstract 4, Unlocked – this started as an abstract then verged into representation when I added the speakers. It was my fantasy of what the end of the lockdown would be like, the dancing and jubilation at that first dance. This will hopefully happen next month in the UK unless something changes – 16 months after the clubs were closed down.

If it does happen on June the 21st, the date is prophetic, as it will be a Midsummer Night’s Dream (or Nightmare) of Dionysian revelry and chaos. Mixed feelings of whether I want to be there or not, it could be heaven or it could be hell. That’s what I tried to depict here.

And like a lot of my pieces, it got remixed into a cover for a mashup of mine, about the same wish for dancing again.