Betti Franceschi - Artist

ARTIST STATEMENT

Since I was a child I've been interested in portraits. A likeness seems to reside in what is particular to the subject, what contradicts my expectations of normal structure. I've always made portraits except when I made a long detour into art about movement.

I've always been interested in bodies that speak. In college I had the luck to study figure drawing and ballet all at the same time, and to dance in operas and musicals. Later in New York I continued to study dance, and to watch and learn through my daughter's professional dance training and career. I've made drawings and paintings with some of New York's iconic dancers. My Still Point drawings focus on the body's center of gravity and study the dancer's instrument. My Signature drawings, an ongoing series of movement portraits, study the dancer's inner line.

In landscape painting I've followed a sense of metaphysical presence. My Big Nudes, drawings and rather large paintings of reclining figures, are a meditation on movement before movement, evoking the imminence of landforms and the metaphysics of light.

As my eyesight diminishes I have taken up sculpture, again with dancers as models. Sculpture uses the same observation as painting and drawing, with a different three-dimensional immediacy.

After a thirty-year incubation I found myself in the Ageless Dancers project: photographing great dancers still vibrant and expressive well into what used to be thought of as the rocking-chair years. As every one of these dancers says when asked their secret: keep moving!