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Aquatic Creatures

Questions for Sigrid von Lintig by Esther Niebel, Gallery ‚The Esther Niebel:
Grass is Greener’, Leipzig There is a long tradition of depicting water in painting: To the
Romantics, water or the sea was a wild force of nature, later
Esther Niebel: it became a form of landscape in Monet, for example, and re-
You’ve been painting swimmers – or rather, people in pools – cently an exuberant sense of life in Hockney and his pool pic-
for about five years now. Some are swimming, some have just tures. It doesn’t assume any of these roles, nor does it quote or
jumped in, some are in swimsuits and some in streetwear. Some develop them either, in your paintings. In your work, water is a
are foreshortened from above, some moving horizontally in the fundamental element into which the subjects dive in order to
water, but they’re all under water, including their faces. Is that experience a different state of body and mind. How would you
intentional? Is there a reason for that? describe the meaning of water in your pictures?

Sigrid von Lintig: Sigrid von Lintig:
The painter and subject are in different realms: one in air, the I show water in its every dynamic, in the interaction between
other in water. The boundary between them forms a plane on moving and being moved. The eye of the viewer also goes into
which what lies behind is strangely represented through reflec- action in order to grasp the many facets of the image. Water’s
tion and refraction. This effect puts me at a greater distance potential to bring forth and take life away is evident in the whirl-
from the subject and gives me more artistic freedom. For the pools, which show water as an active element, a vortex. The
viewer, the boundary between these realms elicits a yearning to ever-changing play of light and colors on the surface makes the
transcend it, to become as weightless as the subject, to dissolve water at once soft and animate. Shapes break up and re-form,
in a swirl of light and become one with the watery surround. though always changed. The visual phenomena underscore
that everything in nature and the world around us is subject to
change. So I don’t see the pictures as frozen instants, but as ex-
pressions of time constantly passing.

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