After working with a lot of darker, muted colours when I saw Andre Derains painting of ‘The Dancer’ I was truly inspired. It made me want to celebrate and indulge in colour in my paintings. Derain has found a way of emoting colour. The bright reds, greens, blues, yellows and whites accentuate the dancers expression... sensual, bold, and aware of the painters presence. People “are always intoxicated with colour, with words that speak of colour, and with the sun that makes colours live.” - Derain

There are many parts of Cezanne’s style of figure painting that inspires me, including the thick layered paint that is so generously applied to the canvas and the simple layout of the figure in the foreground. This focus on the figure without any other distractions in the background highlights the beauty of the human form. The colours are layered together to create the fullness of a figure that is not simply made of an outline but consists of a full body of colours and shades.

“The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and ironically, the more real” - Freud. When painting your subject for hours you eventually begin to focus on the shapes that make up your subject (and stop focusing on what you ‘think’ it should look like)... a heightened sense of the forms. Freud reminds me to study the shapes figures create instead of only attempting to make a ‘real’ looking painting.