For several years now, we have followed Renata Sheppard’s journey as she has worked to bridge the visual and physical arts. Here in Cape Charles, this began with Dance for the Camera, using film to capture dance and movement. This eventually evolved into Experimental Film Virginia, a hybrid film festival and artist residency that involves “a peer-facilitated dance film creation experience”.
This Friday, the Lemon Tree Gallery’s Spring Art Opening featured Renata’s new show, “Kinetic Drawing – Visual Performance Art: Geometry of the body explored through movement”.
This show explores ways for Sheppard to transfer her movements directly onto paper-she places herself on a large paper canvas, with pieces of charcoal, and then moves her body in choreographed gestures, leaving traces of her physical movements on the paper. Merging the physical and the visual, dance and visual art, the works embrace both symmetry and chaos:
Completed works will be on display in Lemon Tree throughout the Spring.
Interesting!
The art work produced somehow reminds me of Leonardo DaVinci!
Hideous. For me it is about as crude as Hunter’s blow spit “art”. But, I suppose, others may see it differently?!?
People see what they want to see and disregard the rest.
What did you think of Leonardo Da Vinci?
Paul…surely you do not put this series of weird contortions in a league with Da Vinci…
But, as often said, art is in the eyes of the beholder. And, in response to your question, I have great respect for a great Master, Da Vinci.
Art is indeed in the eye of the beholder, but I am an engineer, you know, stuck hard and fast in the left brain, so I am seeing a series of circles and ellipses which seem to have some kind of mathematical symmetry, which I called interesting.
It brought to my mind “The Vitruvian Man” by Leonardo da Vinci, which was created by Leonardo around the year 1487, accompanied by notes based on the work of the famed architect, Vitruvius Pollio.
The drawing for those perhaps unfamiliar with it, is in pen and ink on paper and depicts a male figure in two superimposed positions with his arms and legs apart and simultaneously inscribed in a circle and square.
The drawing and text are sometimes called the Canon of Proportions or, less often, Proportions of Man.
The proportional relationship of the parts reflects the universal design.
And a “medical” equilibrium of elements ensures a stable structure.
These qualities are thus shared equally by God’s creation of the human body and the human being’s own production of a good building.
In the late 1480s, this theme of the artistic microcosm emerged as one of the great unifying principles of his thought.
This architectural application is not the end of the matter, however; it only represents the beginning of a concept which had a literally universal application.
This image provides a perfect example of Leonardo’s keen interest in proportion.
In addition, this picture represents a cornerstone of Leonardo’s attempts to relate man to nature.
Encyclopaedia Britannica online states, “Leonardo envisaged the great picture chart of the human body he had produced through his anatomical drawings and Vitruvian Man as a cosmografia del minor mondo (cosmography of the microcosm).”
“He believed the workings of the human body to be an analogy for the workings of the universe.”
Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing of Vitruvian Man is one of the most popular world icons.
There have been countless attempts over the years to understand the composition of Leonardo’s illustration of Vitruvius’ principles.