The Dancer

The elements that are apparent to me at first are the mirror and the woman’s blue dress. From this platform I would like to focus on ideas of melancholy and reflection.The oil on canvas shows an experienced woman with a concentrated expression in a frilled blue flamenco dress wearing blue earrings sitting erect on a metal fold-out chair with a large white fan in her hand. Behind her is a large mirror, giving the viewer a sense of her posture, figure, the emptiness of the room and perhaps a voyeuristic glance at seeing someone at a time when they feel they are alone.Melancholy is expressed through the contrast of vitality and emptiness. She, the viewer can assume, is the sole figure in the room, which appears to be a dance studio. There are wooden beams covering the floor, and one can almost hear the echoes of her steps reverberate across the room if she were to move moves. We cannot see her shoes, but we can assume from her character that she is a Flamenco dancer (and they typically wear heals). However, in contrast to the empty room, she displays a certain energy in her figure. Her shoulders are straight, her back is erect, as if held in a dancer's pose or caught in time amid a dance maneuver. Her neck and head give her the quality of pride. That perhaps she is used to performance and that she is prepared. However in her expression there is an element of sadness. Her hair is pulled back tight and her skin taut, but in the expression of her eyes there is a sadness and defiance. Her lips are subtly turned down in a defiant frown.
On the subject of reflection, one looks toward the mirror. It is in the mirror that the emptiness of the room is confirmed and the starkness of the dancer in the showy blue dress to the room and grey metallic chair is even greater. The interesting thing is the facial expression in the reflection does not seem to correlate exactly with the frontal facial expression. In fact, it appears much more somber – as if giving the viewer a deeper insight into the emotional inner workings of the dancer.