Travelling sketchbooks - dancing round the maypole

I seemed to travel through liquid time and across the vastness of continents this month!

I received an Aborigine-inspired dot piece from M in the latest round of sketchbook passes.
It made me think about what we keep of what was here before, traditions that are constantly under threat of being swept away and the wistfulness of times that we can never quite recapture.

It reminded me of the Plains Indians exhibition that I had seen at the Met in May and their depictions of their traditions on skins and in ledgers.

Top - Grand Robe (Musee du Quai Branly), bottom - ledger art, (Lansburgh Collection)

I thought about depicting one of the oldest English dances, the maypole dance, originally a pagan fertility dance, but with echoes of the Plains Indians war and green corn dances.

This dance is still done, most beautifully, at gatherings in our village by successive generations of our primary school children including my goddaughter, often on limpid June afternoons in dappled sunshine. I had just seen this and it was clearly still insistently tapping away at my head, waiting for its moment.

I take lots of photographs at these events, as little H skips in and out of her friends in their white pinafores.

I also thought about other ancient traditions, particularly pictorial. After a visit to the British Museum, to the Indigenous Australia exhibition, I thought about using raark, a typical simple and somehow very sophisticated way to fill backgrounds. At the BM, I also decided to pay my respects to the bas-reliefs from Nineveh, following news that IS have probably destroyed a lot of these important pre-Islamic archaeological pieces on site in what is now Iraq. So many interesting solutions to pictorial representation, quite apart from the ancient historical aspects. I liked the trees.

I had a coffee and started to think about how this might all come together:

OK for a sketched idea, but difficult to refine, I felt. Too complicated. Too many differing influences. Typical result of an over-excited brain.

I sketched a few dancing body shapes from my maypole photos:

Not very brilliant but giving enough ideas for movement and dress shapes.

Next I thought about the light and shade, and just how this might pan out on a sunny afternoon, in terms of dancing forms against sunlight. And then I found the wavy corrugated wrapper from an old coffee cup. Hurrah!

Oh dear, the dancers looked a bit like angels doing synchronised swimming in an aquarium....

I had done some backgrounds with my Gelli Plate and I thought these might work, suggesting late afternoon dappled sunlight.

This is my final piece for this month's travelling sketchbook. A little distance from where I thought I might be, but I think that's the beauty of the process.