On Your Toes

 
This is the largest painting by Harriet Young that we are aware of and it’s a barn burner. Harriet wasn’t so sure though, and had to be cajoled into entering it in the 1996 open-call juried competition at the Cheltenham Center for the Arts, as David Estey recounts elsewhere on this site in his thoughtful and revealing essay, A Remembrance of Harriet Young.

On Your Toes is a celebration of The Dance, and once again the artist draws on Dance in the cinema for inspiration, including from movies made around the time she was born. She was 66 at the time she painted On Your Toes, and those early movies must have had a profound and lasting impact on her as a young girl.

Anny Ondra in "The Manxman" (1929). Alfred Hitchcock's last silent film.

Scene from "Gold Diggers of 1933".
Where phantasmagoric choreography
makes an appearance in the Art of
Harriet Young, Busby Berkeley is
usually not far away.  

Regarding the man below, we’ll just say he’s Michael Jackson until someone tells us he isn’t. MJ or not, Harriet obviously had no trouble at all conflating different eras into one ebullient celebration of the art form.

MJ ?

Image quality notwithstanding, there are some great things going on in On Your Toes, including an orgy of risk-taking and rule-breaking in pursuit of painterly self-discovery. Not too shabby for an amateur painter four years into her career, and one can only wonder at what could have been had she lived another ten.