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The Perks of Being an Artist

Tag Archives: dance

Searching For My Soul

09 Tuesday May 2017

Posted by emilypageart in art, dance, painting, Uncategorized

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abstract, abstract expressionist, art, artist, dance, dance art, dance painting, dancers, Emily Page Art, expressionism, oil painting, painter, painting, Raleigh artist

In my effort to not leave you totally hanging while I’m living the good life as the youngest person on a boat cruising down the Seine for the next couple weeks, I’m randomly posting some of my paintings for your viewing pleasure. Several years ago, I photographed a group of young dancers to paint from, and I let them all name the paintings. This little dancer had a flair for the dramatic. She chose to call hers “Searching for My Soul.”

Searching for My Soul_compressed

Searching For My Soul 36″ x 24″ oil on canvas

Original available here. Prints and other cool merchandise available here.

 

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Mondays With Muddy

12 Monday Dec 2016

Posted by emilypageart in Uncategorized

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Beatrice Allen Page, dance, faith, God, Landscape with Figures, Mondays with Muddy, unpublished manuscript

Here is the next installment of Beatrice Allen Page’s unpublished manuscript, Landscape With Figures:

“Evening. It has been a strange day. I have not ventured beyond my own yard. If any friends had dropped in on my, they would have found me behaving normally and looking perfectly calm, I think. But inside I have been running furiously to escape the ‘unhurrying chase and unperturbed pace’ following me. Yet at the same time, I was hoping to be caught. There were even times when I turned around to run toward the Pursuer instead of from Him, having first been careful to set up several barriers between us. How ambivalent can one be?

I must have had some naive notion in the back of my head that the conflict was going to be resolved all in one day. If I could not longer keep God out of my life, then I suppose I looked for a sudden ovewhelming conversion or illumination or rebirth. All at once I would be filled with joy and peace and the love that passeth knowledge. I would become Saint Somebody, in short.

Now that the panic of my predicament has worn off, I can think a little more calmly and clearly. I am no longer running, either from or toward. I feel as if I wre beginning a long pilgrimage that will take years, perhaps the rest of my life. I shall very likely get lost many times, and stumble from weariness, and be tempted to turn back – and may well turn back unless I can find more courage and patience, more faith, hope and love than I’ve ever discerned in my character up to date.

There is an old saying that to undertake a journey of a thousand miles, on begins with a single step. Perhaps I took the fist step unwittingly when I was drawn back here. I’m not sure in what direction to take the second step. It is not a journey that can be planned out ahead of time with road maps and advance reservations at comfortable motels. It has, I think, to be moved out like a dance, which is neither an intellectual procedure nor a random miscellany of steps and gestures, but rather the evolvement of one movement out of and into another, all of them related by an underlying intent. It requires discipline and balance and devotion, and the stamina to endure periods of discouragement. Like the dane, moreover, it should never be undertaken in a spirit of plodding drudgery or dogged determination but with a basic bouyancy and trust and sometimes joy in spite of temporary defeats. And like making a dance, it requires constant awareness, the ‘listening attitude’ of Mrs. McCaig, if one is going to hear the music to which one dances.”

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Dance Swag

03 Saturday Dec 2016

Posted by emilypageart in art, dance, painting, Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

art, artist, ballerina, ballet, ballet art, ballet merchandise, ballet swag, christmas present for dancer, dance, dance art, dance merchandise, dance swag, dancer, dancers, Emily Page, Emily Page Art, gift ideas for dancers, male dancer, paint, painter, Raleigh artist

While I’ve been posting a lot of fun merchandise with my art on it, I haven’t highlighted any of the dance art yet. Here’s where I remedy that. As you’ve probably already seen, I’m offering a calendar with some of my dancer paintings, but I’ve also created several black and white dancer “sketches” and added them to all kinds of cool stuff on RedBubble and Fine Art America. Click on the caption below each picture to purchase and/or see more options:

dance-a-line-dress

Leaping A-Line Dress

dance-clock

Crouch Clock

spark iv pillow.png

Spark Throw Pillow

dance-drawstring-bag

Primal Drawstring Bag

dance-laptop-skin-1

Crouch Laptop Skin

dance-pouch

Leaping Pouch

dance-spiral-notebook

Primal Spiral Notebook

spark-scarf

Spark Scarf

dance-tank

Arabesque Contrast Tank

dance-throw-pillow-1

Balance Throw Pillow

dance-tote-bag-1

Balance Tote Bag

dance-t-shirt-1

Crouch Unisex T-Shirt

exuberance-a-line-dress

Exuberance A-line Dress

dance-t-shirt-dress

Balance Graphic T-Shirt Dress

dance-shower-curtain

Arabesque Shower Curtain

Leaping II a-line dress.jpg

Leaping II A-line Dress

arabesque-onesie

Arabesque Onsie for your future dancer!

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Black Friday Cyber Monday Last Call

01 Thursday Dec 2016

Posted by emilypageart in dance, painting, Uncategorized

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art, artist, ballerina, ballet, ballet art, black friday art, cyber monday art, dance, dance art, deal, Emily Page, Emily Page Art, paint, painter, painting, Raleigh artist

Guess what?! I ignored my artistic hatred of Black Friday and offered a deal! *gasp* And then I was lazy and used the exact same coupon code for Cyber Monday. Same deal, different day. This is officially your last chance to take advantage of said deal. Until 12/2/16, I’m offering 20% off of any purchases of $150 or more. I KNOW. Just use the coupon code BlackFriday2016 to save! Shop now at http://shop.emilypageart.com/ and wake up your walls!

Double Arabesque 36x60

Double Arabesque 36″ x 60″ oil on canvas $2,200

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Sinnerman

05 Wednesday Oct 2016

Posted by emilypageart in mental health, music, Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

dance, music, Nina Simone, Sinnerman

It’s been one of those weeks, and I’m about done with people. But I’m choosing to dance away the greys on this grey, grey day. I don’t know why I typed the word “grey” with an “e” when I much prefer it when it’s spelled with an “a.” I’m sure you care deeply. Again, it’s been one of those weeks. Favorite song of the day:

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If Muddy Could See Dance Now

01 Thursday Sep 2016

Posted by emilypageart in art, culture, dance, death, family, MOndays with Muddy, music, Uncategorized

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art, artist, Beatrice Allen Page, contemporary dance, dance, dance art, dancer, dancers, grandmother, Jacob's Pillow, lyrical dance, modern dance, paint, Ruth St. Dennis, So You Think You Can Dance

Obviously, I’ve been watching So You Think You Can Dance (SYTYCD) again this season. While I love it, it makes me miss my grandmother, Muddy, terribly. Before she met my grandfather, Muddy (Beatrice Allen) was a dancer. In fact, she met my grandfather while she was in Germany touring with Ruth St. Dennis. When she decided to settle down and get married at the ripe old age of 19, she gave up dancing professionally and got rid of all of her photos and other mementos from her dancing days. This, obviously, saddens me because I’d love to see that stuff. But what saddens me more, and what makes me miss her more acutely, is watching the dance shows on TV now, particularly SYTYCD. The variety of styles you get from the myriad of choreographers would, I think, overwhelm her, delight her, sharpen her. When you look at what these dancers are capable of now compared to what was asked of them in her early dance years, it reminds me of looking at footage of early gymnasts compared to now. Hell, to be a dancer now, you have to also have a pretty good arsenal of gymnastic tricks, too. If you don’t have a front aerial, you’re going to have a hard time working.

But I just wish that she were around now so that we could watch together and discuss what we were seeing. I would love to share that with her because I know her insight would be incredible. As you’ve seen on this blog from the Mondays With Muddy posts, you know what a thoughtful and thought-full person she was. I know she would have helped me see each dance, dancer, and choreographer from a different angle. I know it’s just a reality show, but there is real art happening there.

Having moved away from doing so many dancer paintings, I think maybe I’m feeling the gap between Muddy and myself more acutely than normal. So perhaps it’s time to figure out how to revisit that work in a new way. I’m thinking maybe I need to combine the realist work with dance imagery. Still trying to flesh out what that will look like, but definitely a direction I want to pursue.

As an aside, be sure to read next week’s Mondays With Muddy post. It’s my favorite from the whole manuscript, and, indirectly, talks about the first time people said she was a good dancer.

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I’m a SYTYCD Kind of Artist

30 Tuesday Aug 2016

Posted by emilypageart in art, blog, culture, dance, dementia, Fractured Memories, gratitude, painting, technology, Uncategorized

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

art, artist, Beatrice Allen Page, dance, dance art, Emily Page, Emily Page Art, paint, painting, realist art, So You Think You Can Dance, SYTYCD

As a young artist fresh out of college, I was told by multiple galleries that I needed to “pick a style.” Every time I showed them my portfolio, that’s what they told me. My art had too big a range for them to consider me. They didn’t know how to represent me. Having worked in art galleries since then, I understand their point of view. They need to know that I will continue to produce work in a style that sells for them. The problem with this, though, is that it doesn’t suit my personality as a person or an artist. I have too many ideas that make my brain itch and twitch, and there isn’t one style that can encompass all of them. My hands and my brain get bored repeating a single formula in a variety of ways.

This is not to say that there’s not a benefit to being forced to create series of works that can be grouped together. I have found great reward in creating first the Thanatology series, then the dancers, then the works about dementia, and now the realist work. But I like to dip my toes into other art forms and styles periodically to test the water to see what the next new series will be. I also like having the freedom to revisit past series when a new idea comes along, like when I did a the new dancer painting by letting you all “crowd source” each stage. And when you do several pieces in a certain style, you can start to get followers who look for that particular work.

I was watching So You Think You Can Dance (SYTYCD), and it occurred to me that their all-stars must be, in some ways, like me. The fact that they return to the show means that they enjoy dancing outside of their “own styles.” They like to stretch, literally and figuratively. And each new style, each new dance, each new partner helps grow their abilities and add to their repertoire. And so it is with me. For example, taking watercolors along on my trip down the Danube helped me expand my own artistic vocabulary. I have a feeling I’ll return to them periodically, particularly because there are so many more styles to try within that medium. Branching out and illustrating my friend’s children’s book was a new way to stretch for me, and makes me think that I would actually consider someday illustrating the beautiful stories my grandmother wrote for my dad and uncle.

There are just so many possibilities with art.

Sometimes I get overwhelmed by them all, because I want to do everything, make everything. When I see an artist whose work I like, I mentally file the style for use later to express my own ideas. And there just isn’t enough time in the day to work a job, promote the art I’ve already made, and make everything that I want to make. That being said, I’m grateful that I’m living in the technology age, where I’m not dependent upon galleries to represent me in just one style. I can throw everything on my website, SYTYCD style, including the stuff that doesn’t fit neatly into a single body of work. I call that stuff my untamed art. I can promote various styles and subjects through various online venues. But I get bogged down in the tedium of promotion. I just want to create, and I want a fairy godmother who will magically find homes for my creations. Le sigh.

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Mondays With Muddy

07 Monday Mar 2016

Posted by emilypageart in dance, MOndays with Muddy, Uncategorized, writing

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Beatrice Allen Page, Beatrice Page, dance, journal, Landscape with Figures, unpublished manuscript, writing

Welcome to another installment of Mondays With Muddy. I had an interesting talk yesterday with a minister who knew my grandmother, Beatrice Allen Page, in the late 70’s early 80’s and who had struck up a friendship with her, despite her being about 40 years his senior. It was perfect timing for him to stumble across my blog and reach out. Talking with people who knew your loved ones helps you feel in some ways like you’re getting little pieces of them back. And if I’m getting a piece of Muddy back, I feel in some way like it’s one more connection to her son, my dad. Fortuitous coincidences make the world go ’round.

Here is the next excerpt from my grandmother’s unpublished manuscript, Landscape With Figures:

“When I was walking over to the village today, a man stopped his car to ask me for directions. ‘I’ve been looking for a sign,’ he said, ‘but I haven’t seen any.’

‘We’re all looking for signs,’ I said, giving in to the playful impulse, ‘but few of us ever see any.’ When he looked at me blankly, I explained with a smile, ‘Signs and portents.’ He still looked blank so I quickly gave him the directions he wanted and he drove off, probably reflecting on the odd characters one meets in an out-of-the-way New England village.

I walked on speculating about the human weakness for looking for auguries, for clues to one’s destiny, whether in the entrails of animals or the Delphic oracle, whether in the stars or the palm of the hand, whether in the tarot cards or a crystal ball.

I remember, when I was a child, kneeling by my open window on cold winter nights, trying to draw my bare feet under my flannel nightgown, shivering half with cold and half with fear as I gazed up at a sky filled with stars and prayed God for a sign. I’m not sure what kind I expected, whether the appearance of an enormous angel with wings outspread across the heavens, or a word written in huge letters, or just a flash of fire. It was not that I wanted proof of God’s existence – I took that for granted. It was rather that He was so infinitely remote, and with all those billions of stars in the sky and all the billions of people on earth, could He single out any special planet, any special person, namely, one little girl with my name? In other words, when I prayed for a sign, all I wanted was proof that God knew of my existence.

It’s not so very unlike much of our adult behavior, the difference being that as adults we try to force recognition not from God but from other human beings, which is in line with what I was thinking recently about the need to impress people. Hence this struggle to ‘make a name’ for oneself. Anonymity makes our lives null and void.

Yet I recall an experience I had several times in my early days as a dancer, which contradicts that assertion. I was a member of a group, all of us anonymous except for our names in very small print on the program, and more or less indistinguishable from one another. Not that we were just a row of duplicates as in a chorus line; we moved as part of one whole but in individual patterns. Nevertheless, it would have been impossible for the audience to have attached the right name from the program to the right dancer on the stage. I had no desire to stand out. It was the very anonymity that gave me a sense of vitality I’ve never know in quite the same way since. I was part of something greater than myself, sustained by it, freed by it, intensified by it, even exalted by it.

It had nothing in common, so far as I know, with the reinforced energy one presumably feels as part of a rioting mob, or with the exuberance of being one of the crowd at a football game. I can only describe it as a feeling of deepened relatedness to all of life that was tremendously liberating. I’m sure it could only be released through discipline, harmony, form.

Those qualities are also essential to a dance performed alone. Yet the power I felt on occasion as a soloist, which is exhilarating and gratifying to the ego, and what most of us probably strive for most of the time, was entirely different from that which I felt within the group.

If I were given a choice now of experiencing one kind of power or the other, I should certainly choose…no, I’m not sure. In all honesty, I’m just not sure. Even though I know that the anonymous kind was more deeply satisfying than the self-assertive, the ego persists in wanting to be singled out and valued about others.”

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Dance Party D’Aujourd’hui

03 Thursday Mar 2016

Posted by emilypageart in dance, gratitude, music, Uncategorized

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Buckwheat Zydeco, dance, dance party, dancing the sad away, Hey Ma Petit Fille

Still starting my days with a little dance party, even though I’m getting sick. Here is today’s dance party inspiration:

 

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Mondays With Muddy

29 Monday Feb 2016

Posted by emilypageart in art, dance, MOndays with Muddy, Uncategorized

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ballet, Beatrice Allen Page, Beatrice Page, dance, exercise, journal, Landscape with Figures, unpublished manuscript, writing

Here is the next excerpt from Beatrice Allen Page’s unpublished manuscript, Landscape with Figures:

“Memo to myself: Things to do in a doorway after sitting still too long. First pick an inside doorway in line with a window that has a view if possible. It makes the exercises more enjoyable:

  1. Stand back about 10″ with the palms braced against the frame of the door at shoulder level, elbows bent at right angles. Keeping the torso and legs straight and the heels on the floor, lean forward so that the should blades are forced together. (Very good for tense shoulders and back.) Hold for a moment, then push back to starting position. Repeat several times.
  2. In the same position but with palms pressed lightly against frame instead of braced against it, raise alternate knees as high as possible, pointing toes down hard at same time. Don’t let torso cave in at waist; keep it firm and straight.
  3. Same position: twist head slowly from side to side. Drop head forward and let it swing gently, first to one side then to the other. Be sure to keep shoulders relaxed.
  4. Same position: swing right leg forward and back about 12 times. Keep leg straight and partially turned out from the hip with toe pointed. This allows the foot to pass along the floor smoothly in the middle of the swing. Repeat with left leg.
  5. Repeat 4 but this time do it with relaxed instead of straight legs.
  6. Instead of pressing palms against frame, clutch the farther edges of the frame with fingers. If there isn’t room for fingers to slip through the gap where the door is hinged, move to the other side of the doorway. Keeping the stomach and buttock muscles taut and the legs straight, pull backwards at the waist. The point of this exercise is to stretch and strengthen the lower back. Try to feel the vertebrae in that area of the spine stretching apart. Return slowly to starting position. Repeat several times.
  7. Combine 1 and 6 in a slow, easy, rhythmic forward-and-back, push-and-pull movement without pauses, changing position of the hands from brace to clutch in the middle of each movement.
  8. Return to position in which palms are resting lightly against frame. Rise up on balls of feet, stretching as tall as possible, keeping back straight and stomach pulled in. Lower heels. Repeat several times.
  9. With hands resting on door frame, turn feet and knees out (ballet 1st position); bend and straighten knees alternately, several times. Do not force; do it gently.
  10. In same ‘1st position’ rise on toes and bend knees alternately.
  11. Stand right in the middle of the doorway with arms lowered and the backs of the hands pressed as hard as possible against the door jambs. After a minute or two, when fatigue sets in, relax arms and walk out into the room. What happens then still surprises and delights me almost as much as when this little trick was first played on me as a child.”

 

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Emily Page

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