GREY LINES, a solo exhibition by Noella Roos

at Gaya Art Space on February 04th-March 04th, 2012

Noella Roos (born 27 January 1969, Amsterdam) is a Dutch painter and drawer.

Born into a family of artists, her talent was nourished and stimulated

from early childhood. In this artistic environment Noella was given every chance

to fully develop her visual qualities. As a result her paintings and drawings betray a classical

and technical basis that is seldom seen in the current generation of artists.

At the Dutch art academies, after all, personal development is strongly

placed before mastery of technique. Noella Roos chose her own

path, averse to the ongoing ‘trend’.

Her drawings are inspired by Michelangelo, Käthe Kollwitz, Andrea del Sarto

and also Dooijenwaard.

Noella lets dancers dance on music in her studio on Bali, and then draws these dancers

while in motion with compressed chalk on white paper. She prefers chalk

because it is an ‘honest’ medium: the resulting drawing is either good or bad;

you cannot change or erase parts. When she works, Noella is inspired by the movement

of the body. ”Everyone has their own ‘language’ when they dance, influenced and shaped

by cultural backgrounds, but primarily it is an expression of the emotional involvement

with the music”.

Her fascination for moving figures gradually led to the development of a technique

in which she could convincingly capture the movement as quick as

the dancers dance. Her interest is focused on the muscle movements

and on the light that reflects on the moving body. She continues

drawing a dancing model until she can fully fathom the movement of the model. That is why

Noella prefers to work with only one dancer for a longer period.

In the end she and the model are as one person. At the same time drawing

and moving she follows the rhythm of the dance.

Then, it is no longer a matter of hard work; thinking and doing have merged together.

At this exhibition drawings from modern dancers from Europe and drawings from

a beautiful traditional Balinese dancer, Dayu Indah from Peliatan,

will be exhibited. The Balinese dancer, however, dances on modern music from Philip Glass

and Arvo Pärt. Noella Roos tells me how amazing it was to see a traditional Legong dancer

dance on classical contemporary music, as if she was a modern dancer from Europe.

Good dancers can dance out of feelings and emotions with the music, and then

it doesn’t matter if you come from Bali or Europe.

Noella Roos is inspired by traditional Balinese dance because this is full of architectonic lines.

Balinese dance has a lot of Golden Mean ratios in its dances and customs,

as in architecture. This Golden Mean, also called the Divine Proportion,

is everywhere in the works of Noella Roos. And is similar to

the proportions of the Balinese size are guarded by equations of scale that set out lengths,

breadths and widths relative to the body measurements .

Balinese dance is sometimes accused of being ‘sweet’.

However, most of the dances are strong and expressive.

Also Noella likes to make drawings where she visualizes the expressions

from the dance, and not necessarily the character or pose of the dancing girl or boy.

Noella draws dancers as dancing lines and does not draw the traditional costumes.

This, she says, attracts too much attention away from the emotions and expression of the dance itself.

Noella Roos said that she tries to capture that one moment of sublime connection

between the dancer, the artist and the music.

Only that sublime one moment of connection can result in a good drawing. Her lines are free open, grey, not too black. Drawing for her is as dancing

together with the dancer and a path to a better understanding of the dance in Bali.

The artistic connections between Asia and Europe are as old as history.

Noella Roos, with her respect for classical education, both of the west

as well as of the east, manages to visualize traditional Asian dance in a modern way.