By Margherita Cole on January 1, 2022

You can really feel the energy of the dancers just by looking at these paintings.

While many painters choose to recreate the stationary people or objects around them, artist Betty Acquah captures life in action. She utilizes swatches of vibrant color and mesmerizing patterns to illustrate the rhythm and beauty of dances in her native Ghana.

Acquah’s distinct style resembles both the expressive dabs of paint from Van Gogh and the precise pointillism of Seurat. Her carefully curated color palette is applied onto the canvas with thick rectangular brushstrokes, traveling around the figures and towards the edges of the canvas. As a result, these vivid vortexes communicate the energy of the figures in mid-motion. “The background echoes the movement of figures and therefore create(s) a pulsating surface that brings the composition alive,” she says. “By extending dabs of color in the subject matter into the background and vice-versa, an illusion of movement is created.”[…]

More: Ghanaian Artist Captures the Rhythm of Dance in Pointillistic Paintings