Ballet paintings 2002

This three series of paintings were another commission for a cruise liner, Navigator of The Seas, for three different dining rooms, all named after ballets. I approached each set a little differently, but all the paintings are essentially portraits of characters from the ballets.

It's interesting that two of the ballets chosen, Coppelia and The Nutcracker are based on stories by E.T.A. Hoffman. Of course, the ballets took out all the interesting stuff from the narratives, the elements that inspired Freud to write about Hoffman's stories in The Uncanny; like all good fairy tales, there's lots of rich material in them for deconstructing along psychological lines, and they turn out to be all about Oedipal complexes, castration anxiety, and threatening female sexuality.

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©copyright 2005 Nicholas Middleton