Mark Dancey

For his current series of round oil paintings of acrobatic nudes, Mark Dancey studied the great ceiling painters of the past and adopted their strategies of rendering the body in forced perspective. With a few symbolic props, these aerialists each inhabit a space that stretches to a three hundred and sixty degree horizon. For Dancey, the circle is the perfect shape. It is a symbol for recurring cycles of nature that contradict notions of linear time and progression. It provides the ideal arena in which to depict the human body against the backdrop of the timeless, infinite and indifferent universe in which we find ourselves.

Mr. Dancey was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1963 and received his B.A. in psychology from the University of Michigan in 1986. He now lives in Detroit.