Wild swimming seems all the rage no? Or maybe its promoters and advocates have been lately more articulate and evangelical (the bible being the late Roger Deakin’s Waterlog). I am...
Wild swimming seems all the rage no? Or maybe its promoters and advocates have been lately more articulate and evangelical (the bible being the late Roger Deakin’s Waterlog).
I am a latecomer to its allure, I must say, still fighting visceral feelings and memories of shivering on the banks of the brown River Teviot in Hawick in the 1970s and 80s.
A bum on a rock. I’d say by her hair that she hasn’t been in the water yet.
Come on in the water’s lovely.
I wonder if I unconsciously stole the left and right figures from Renaissance Italy. To the right, the figure seems close to that casual and slightly homoerotic moment in the background of Piero’s Christ in the National Gallery. A figure in the act of taking his top off.
The other seems like I must have thought of that Masaccio in Florence, The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden. I’ve stood in front of both paintings for hours. There’s a whole tradition of bathing painting, or alternately people standing around doing nothing, sometimes naked sometime clothed. Like in Picasso’s blue and rose period. They seem to be just being in a painting.