As Promised

On The Dance Floor (in progress) 2005 & 2015 oil on canvas 38 x 24 in.

Apologies for my first entry of 2015 being two weeks late, on the 15th of the month! To make it up to you I will try to write twice a month from now on:  on the 1st and the Ides.
As promised, here is one of the paintings I have spent time reworking. Like the recent movie Boyhood, some paintings could be 12-year projects! It's still not completely finished, but you can play Spot the Difference.
I always liked the two central faces. The long-haired man is loosely painted, which best portrays a body in motion, so I left him mostly as-is. The red-haired woman, with her eye contact with the viewer, is the strongest feature of the image so I only dialed up the contrast and color (I can't say enough about the impact of red lipstick)! I wanted these two figures to look like they were caught in a spotlight panning across the dance floor, so the peripheral people would become more of a vignette.
This previously mostly blue, green and yellow painting looked watery to me. I went back in adding warmer colors - red, purple and rich, velvety black - with the intention of catching the drama of a night scene. I made the hair colors more realistic, added a dancing hand or two, and am playing with skin tones and clothing colors until the painting feels real, special and harmonious. It would be nice to add the colored lights and flashes of a club, but it can't be gratuitous:  the photo was taken from the balcony of a night club looking down at the dance floor with a flash camera, and there was no fancy lighting. We are almost there.