In Half Lord Of The Fishes the fluidity of Groobey’s paint is at odds with the painful contortion of the figure, and makes the scene seem graceful and poetic, like a ballet. Groobey thinks of her work in relation to activities such as dance, gymnastics, and equestrian dressage, performance-based sports where the extremes of physical and mental discipline are evaluated on the subtleties of aesthetic presentation. Groobey considers her canvases as similar to arenas: competitive stages where her painterly action is pushed to maximum endurance and choreographed to seem flowing and effortless.