Victoria-based figurative painter Lisa Hebden became interested in the idea that sparked her current exhibit, Swimmers, while in Argentina in 2012. It was a hot summer and she spent a lot of time in pools; she wanted to delve deeper into how the connection to ourselves changes when we’re in the water, our skin distorted by chlorine rings and sunlight.
“I feel like you can’t just paint whatever, you have to paint something that you have some kind of connection to,” she says. “I just started to really connect with the part of myself that loved to swim, and I thought, ‘Okay, well, this feels right; this feels like the right direction to go in when I get home.’”
Once she was in her studio, it was really clear where she was going to go with her art, she says. From a thematic point of view, the exhibit stems from feelings.
“How do I feel when I’m in the water? How do other people feel when they’re in the water? How do they behave, and how do they, kind of, shed their egos once they get in the water and they start to play like kids? I just really started to think about that and notice that,” she says.
Hebden started with life-sized canvases. With this exhibit, she knew that unless she did it on a large scale, she wasn’t going to be able to get a feel for what it’s like to make the piece.
“I’ve definitely done really big pieces that have not been successful,” she admits. “What I end up doing is just chalking it up to experience and ripping it off the stretcher and starting again.”
The process started with source material—people swimming, captured by a disposable underwater camera. It was sometimes hard to get the shot right, says Hebden.
“I didn’t really have, even, a viewfinder, and when you’re under water, you’re kind of not at your best,” she says. “I even had goggles on, but I was sort of blind. I didn’t really know, in some cases, if the photographs were going to work out.”
And sometimes they didn’t, says Hebden. She says that about one in 10 images were scrapped completely, two in 10 worked out beautifully, and the others took some freedom in the translation from photograph to painting to get right.
“The colour was off, or the figure was blurry, or there was part of the figure that was missing that made it awkward,” she says. “So I did a lot of filling in and a lot of inventing, and that was a huge challenge, and that still is a huge challenge for me. I’ve gotten to the point now that I’ve done so many of these pieces that sometimes even if the light isn’t the way I want it… I love that really harsh light that you get underwater where it creates all those little ribbons on the skin—some of my sources from that trip, it was a cloudy day, so there wasn’t any of that.”
Hibden took the “still, flat light” brought about by the clouds and thought about what it would look like if it was sunny. She had to do it that way because she had no access to a pool for a long time because of the pandemic.
“How would that light reflect on that shoulder, because it’s the closest thing to the surface of the water?” she says. “It’s been a really interesting challenge for me to do that, to kind of look at the sources that I have that were successful and kind of say, ‘Okay, well, with this particular figure, if it was a sunny day, I would add white here, I would add these ribbons here.’”
Swimmers
Until Saturday, July 31
1 pm to 5 pm, Tuesday to Sunday
Fortune Gallery
537 Fisgard Street
fortunegallery.ca