Unbelievable Realist Paintings of Women Underwater Look Like Photos

Recalling both idyllic summer days at the pool, New York-based painter Matt Story captures many facets of the underwater world with an eerie accuracy just shy of hyperrealism in his new show at Robert Lange Studios, Water. The collection depicts women in mid-stroke, dive, or glidding beneath the surface of swimming pools and ocean waves. At a glance, Story's images could be photographs, but closer inspection reveals their painterly nature.

"I love painting images that seem at once abstract and photorealistic," he tells The Creators Project, elegantly summarizing the paradox of his captivating works. "I get this in the underwater environment, the distortions, the prismatic colors and strange depths of field. It’s as endlessly complex and fascinating to me as his water gardens were to Monet or the human mass was to Rodin. Every painting is shockingly new to me, and not just because of my early onset dementia," he jokes.

Story's paintings start out as ideas of poses which he sketches. Then he takes tens of thousands of pictures of models, directing them to match his vision, but also improvising.  "The underwater environment is so unpredictable and dynamic, I have to let a lot just happen and keep shooting as it all unfolds," he says.

After the shoot, he builds thousands of images into a single image that will become the framework for the painting, using Photoshop and a Wacom tablet. From there, he uses the old school grid-and-sketch technique to transfer his idea onto giant canvases, rather than the common modern practice of projection and tracing. Story explains that, "it gives a slightly less mechanical and more painterly distortion to the draftsmanship."

Then comes the hard part. "I spend hundreds of hours slugging it out with paint and panel," he says. Straddling the line between realism and hyperrealism, which seeks to erase all evidence of brushstrokes, Story has to get the details right, but not too right. "The underwater environment is so alien it's other worldly," he continues. "Depicting something that looks almost unreal in a way that looks convincingly real, is challenging per se. The reflections of water are utterly abstract, but the eye can still detect a rhythm and fabric of realism that can’t be violated without unhinging the entire illusion. Color is where I spend most of my time problem solving during this process."

Looking around the gallery, it's striking how many different ways Story can depict the same subject matter: women swimming underwater. He views it as an ongoing exploration of the human body. "I was striving to put classical forms in contemporary settings in a new way, he says. "Instead of Manet’s Olympia reclining nude on a sofa, I have her doing a backflip underwater in a bikini! (Ha! Take that École de Beaux-Arts!)"

Beyond that, he finds himself attracted to the sunken realm for more cerebral reasons. "One of the things painting does well, as an art form, is present metaphor.  Water is this amazing metaphor for the deeper self.  We drink, wash, drown, float, swim and splash our way through life.  When I paint a woman floating under water, I see her as suspended in her own self awareness. She’s immersed in the deeper self, with its risks and fears, and then her emerging takes on a sense of re-birth, a cleansing, a baptism. Our first sensations occurred to us while floating in a warm, nurturing maternal pool too, so the similes are complex," he says. "Of course, water also has a fun playful side.  We all share those memories of fun and relaxing summers at beaches and pools, immersed in joy. I’d bet the vast majority of us have at least one cherished memory like that."

Story admits that his artwork is part process, part compulsion. "Art is a trick really, using aesthetic beauty as a tool to access some collective awareness in a viewer, a shared humanness. But the trick is different than performing magic, where the magician knows the illusion.  I think in the case of art, even the artist may not know the trick. She only performs the steps and sometimes the magic imbues the work," he says. "But art at its best is when the artist becomes a conduit of her own collective awareness and that work becomes a mirror for the viewers own awareness.  Magic!"

Water will hang at Robert Lange Studios in Charleston until February 26 and can be seen daily from 11-5pm. See more of Matt Story's work on his website.

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