Fans exercise creativity, bodies in paint dancing
Posted on Monday, April 14, 2008
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Style/222830/
Talk about fitness fusion: A group in Seattle has found a way to combine painting with dancing.
The fanny-shaking, paintsplattering, sing-out-loud, ironyfree experience is exactly like it sounds: While you paint, you also dance. Once a month, this hybrid activity happens in the Gasworks Gallery studio of artist Matt Jones, creator of organized paint dancing.
At last month’s session, thirdtimer Rebecca Leamon, a nurse, shook her hips and tapped her toes. Though she hadn’t painted since she was a child, she wasn’t intimidated by the instant creativity. Using her fingertips, she made repeated ridges in deep orange and yellow on her paper.
“It’s all about the self-expression,” she said. “You never know what’s going to come out.”
Nearby, as Madonna’s “Borderline” got the crowd revved up, another woman’s painting started spare and calligraphic in thick red and black. Before long, the entire paper was covered in a mash of dark colors and thick paint. Dark and primal, it represented the intense headache she had earlier that evening.
Jones, an abstract painter, online entrepreneur and do-gooder, got the idea while painting in his studio with a friend, listening to music and dancing.
“It’s something I do a lot,” he said. “In fact, I think a lot of artists paint and dance at the same time.”
He joked about a site called paintdancing. com and, curious, later searched for it online. Sure enough, the URL was available.
Jones snapped it up, created a Web site and e-mailed his 3, 000-plus-person mailing list about the new activity. New Year’s Eve 2007 was the public debut — and the house was packed. It’s not hard to pack this house, aka Jones’ studio, which measures about 20 feet by 20 feet and has four tables for painting.
Jones has tried all sorts of music, from Latin jazz to tribal, heavy rock, disco and ’ 30 s swing. “I’ve tried everything and what people seem to like are ’ 80 s rock ’n’ roll classics,” Jones said.
They also like some alt-rock and disco. “The grunge,” he said, “doesn’t seem to do it.”