Candle Dancers 1912

Emil Nolde's ‘Candle Dancers’ is awash with feverish, flickering reds, oranges, pinks, and yellows. I wonder what it was like for Nolde to approach the blank canvas, mixing those colors, maybe thickly, maybe adding turpentine to make them runnier... I imagine he was deeply moved by the sight of the candle dancers, and wanted to capture their energy. The figures appear to be caught mid-motion, their forms dissolving into the vibrant atmosphere. The scene is almost hallucinatory, a dreamscape rendered in bold, expressive strokes. Look at the way Nolde uses color to define the figures. The pink limbs and faces are roughly hewn, almost raw in their intensity. In contrast, the skirts are alive with swirling patterns, like flames consuming the dancers from below. There’s something untamed in Nolde’s brushwork, a sense of urgency. He’s part of a long line of artists, from Van Gogh to Kirchner to us today, all wrestling with paint to find new ways to express what it feels like to be alive. And, like a dance, there is no beginning or end, only the movement itself.