Le Tango, Paris 2018 Painting

This painting was inspired by a late night at Le Tango, an iconic LGBT ‘guinguette’ club in Paris. Although the last time I went dancing there was long before the COVID pandemic, it is when the lockdowns started to ease off that the memory of it became significant. I remembered the bunting and the dizzying rotation of glitter-ball lights on the ceiling, and I wanted to recapture what we had taken for granted before: the ability to be in a crowded place, where there is music and fun. There was no real planning for this painting - the colours are broadly faithful to that of the bunting on the night, but everything else is dashes of leftover paint from other artworks that I would have been working on at the time. It took about six months to reach a point where I felt nothing more could be done.