Fern Acheson (b. 2000)

Dancing Blue Figures

Watercolour and gouache on paper

Size: 40.6cm x 30.5cm (paper); 55.5cm x 45.5cm (frame)

Signed

There is a music to Fern’s Dancing Blue Figures. With a seemingly uninterrupted line sweeping across the paper, bodies begin to emerge from and merge into one another. The scene evokes a day at the beach: lounging figures recline in various relaxed positions, from the intimacy of a hand gently resting on a knee in the top right corner to the subtle detail of a figure cantering on a horse in the left. Although in poses of lounging relaxation, the dynamic draftmanship of Fern’s lines creates a fluid sense of movement and danse: hers is the vitality of the human body in ensemble. Her lines trace out the music in and between the shapes and forms of the body. 

​

This vibrant sense of movement equally comes from the symphonic plays of colour. As line discriminates contours, colour fills out shape: analogous shades of blue harmoniously pair alongside one another, creating a fluid but balanced conversation between the base blue and modulated aquamarines, navies, and baby-blues. The use of white also contributes to this sense of balance; the spaces of white paper become solid shapes of blank colour that complement the shaped, blue figures. It is as if the human body fills even empty space with its movement. As Fern describes it, her ‘paintings make visible the positive and negative spaces made by the human body’. 

A clear inspiration is Matisse’s sculpturesque yet soft and dynamic figures. The cut-outs from his later period, particularly Nu Bleu IV, come to mind. Matisse described how he wanted to ‘cut directly into vivid colour’ in his preferred medium of ‘gouaches découpés’. Fern’s Dancing Figures similarly exploit the powerful colour and opacities of gouache; in the same spirit of Matisse’s cut-outs, they are experimental, aesthetically considered compositions of colour and shape. Hanging close to Fischetti’s Ratto di Europa, Fern’s Dancing Blue Figures pars down the elaborate playfulness of Fischetti’s rococo panel with a modern simplicity. The human body in movement is shown to be ultimately enlivened by the fundamentals: the harmonic interplay of analogous colour and simplified shape.