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Robert Heindel print up for auctionSeptember 26, 2008 Birmingham Royal Ballet has recently received an additional item for its October 2008 fundraising auction. Mike Dyer has very kindly donated a signed, framed, limited edition print of Robert Heindel's painting Forgetful of Virtue (pictured right). Measuring 40 x 44 inches, the print is numbered 16/250. For more about the auction, visit www.brb.org.uk/auction. 'In terms of dance, he is the artist that everyone has followed, that everyone has emulated', said Birmingham Royal Ballet Director David Bintley of Heindel. 'Everyone who is painting dance now has taken something from Bob. For me he transcended dance, because he understood it, in a way not a lot of other people really do. But Bob just knew what it was about because he'd hung around with dancers long enough to understand what it was all about. 'I love that painting of his called The Flame, it embodies something nobody else would have seen and captured. When some of the girls are sewing ribbons on shoes and so on, they have a lighter to seal the ends, which stops it from fraying. So there's a great picture of his where a dancer has just lit a flame to burn it, and everything else is in darkness, just this pool of light. It's an amazing moment because nobody else would have picked up on it, nobody else would have seen it and painted a moment like that. They'd have been too busy painting ballet! But he didn't paint ballet, he painted the rooms, and the intimacy, and reflections off floors and mirrors and things.' Heindel began working with Birmingham Royal Ballet after seeing David Bintley's 'Still Life' at the Penguin Café, which he created for The Royal Ballet. David takes up the story, 'Bob came to photograph my ballet when we were at the Royal Opera House - he knew Anthony Dowell [then Artistic Director of The Royal Ballet] because he'd previously painted him.' Heindel had already worked with a number of leading lights from the world of dance - his oil canvas of Sir Frederick Ashton is now within the permanent collection at the National Portrait Gallery in London. 'I met up with him,' remembers David, 'and I went to the 'Still Life' exhibition and then when I created Carmina burana for Birmingham, the same thing happened, he went crazy for that as well. And the relationship grew and he became a friend of the Company.' As well as regularly donating prints of his work to Birmingham Royal Ballet, Heindel's paintings went on to adorn performance posters and programme covers, and in 1994 David invited him to create designs for a new piece he was creating, The Dance House (pictured above), which premiered in San Francisco in 1995 and returns to the Company's repertory this year. Sadly, Heindel died in 2005 at the age of 67, but he lives on in his drawings, paintings and designs, and in the memories of those who knew him. ENDS |
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