Dancing to Sinatra

It started, as Nancy's paintings often do, with a photograph — a stolen moment from a dance floor somewhere, a woman mid-step, arm flung wide, a red rose tucked behind her ear like a dare. But photographs only hold time still. Nancy's job, as she sees it, is to let it go again. So the colors deepened. The curtains behind her became a wall of crimson, theatrical and close, like the held breath before the music drops. The floor fractured into a harlequin pattern of indigo and gold, tilting slightly, unstable in the way that dance floors always are. The man on the right edge of the canvas was left unresolved on purpose — a blur of navy and momentum, present but not yet arrived, the way partners in dance sometimes feel. And at the center of it all, she reaches. Her arm extends toward someone just out of frame, or perhaps toward nothing at all, toward the pure pleasure of the stretch. This is a painting about a feeling more than a place. The feeling of being in your body, in the music, in a moment that is yours entirely. Nancy Cicchetti has been painting that feeling for thirty years — in Marin, in galleries across California and New York, in works that live in private homes and public collections. This piece from her Dancers series carries all of that: the eye moving, the light catching, the story waiting for the viewer to take it the rest of the way.