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Aquatic Creatures

Interview with Sigrid von Lintig Romantics, water or the sea was a wild force of nature, later
it became a form of landscape in Monet, for example, and re-
Esther Niebel: cently an exuberant sense of life in Hockney and his pool pic-
You’ve been painting swimmers – or rather, people in pools – tures. It doesn’t assume any of these roles, nor does it quote or
for about five years now. Some are swimming, some have just develop them either, in your paintings. In your work, water is a
jumped in, some are in swimsuits and some in streetwear. Some fundamental element into which the subjects dive in order to
are foreshortened from above, some moving horizontally in the experience a different state of body and mind. How would you
water, but they’re all under water, including their faces. Is that describe the meaning of water in your pictures?
intentional? Is there a reason for that?
Sigrid von Lintig:
Sigrid von Lintig: I show water in its every dynamic, in the interaction between
The painter and subject are in different realms: one in air, the moving and being moved. The eye of the viewer also goes into
other in water. The boundary between them forms a plane on action in order to grasp the many facets of the image. Water’s
which what lies behind it is strangely represented through re- potential to bring forth and take life away is evident in the whirl-
flection and refraction. This effect puts me at a greater distance pools, which show water as an active element, a vortex. The
from the subject and gives me more artistic freedom. For the ever-changing play of light and colors on the surface makes the
viewer, the boundary between these realms elicits a yearning to water at once soft and animate. Shapes break up and re-form,
transcend it, to become as weightless as the subject, to dissolve though always changed. The visual phenomena underscore
in a swirl of light and become one with the watery surround. 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-
Esther Niebel: pressions of time constantly passing.
There is a long tradition of depicting water in painting: To the

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