E. Brooke Lanier
“Your New Family,” 2010, Vinyl lettering, acrylic, and oil on panel, 16” x 20”
“Red Zone,” 2010, Vinyl lettering, acrylic, and oil on panel, 12” x 12”
Artist Statement
Competitive swimming, a common activity for many children and adolescents, is a sport that encompasses strange phenomenon. Underwater, the rules are different. Water, fogged goggles, and seemingly omnipresent light sources in, around, and above the pool create distinctive varieties of luminosity and undulating shadows. Sound becomes distended. Our bodies meet more physical resistance to the substance surrounding us, which creates an altered sense of time, power, awareness of one’s environment. Over the years, formal properties of swimming pools, such as their geometric structure and diffused light, have surfaced in my paintings, but this is the first body of work which centers entirely upon that subject matter.
Upon submersion, a swimmer enters a different world and becomes isolated and alone even when surrounded by others. Swimming is both a group activity and an individual, introspective sport, and therefore is an excellent choice of sport for awkward people with poor interpersonal skills.
In competitive swimming, as in many other areas, effort and dedication do not necessarily lead to success, especially in the mission to achieve arbitrary, insignificant, or intangible goals. Racing has its own insular logic. You go as fast as you can, hit the wall as hard as you can, use the momentum to launch you in the opposite direction, and do it again. You do it again and again until it is time to stop. It is time to stop because you have gone as far as someone else decided you should go. You aim to swim that far in a given amount of time because of a goal you made. Maybe the immediate goal was to get a personal best time, but the real goal is to go faster than a pre-determined time standard. The time standard is derived from some unknown person or committee’s concept of how fast people of a given age group and sex should be able to swim in order to compete in meets of varying levels of prestige, athleticism, and elitism. In order to be a serious contender, you must swim 3-5 hours a day, six days a week, plus belly work, stretches, and competitions. You must do whatever your coach tells you to do.
In my swimming career I completely devoted myself to a pursuit with no possibly attainable future prospects. I trained just as hard as my teammates who went to State, Zone Championships, Nationals, earned college scholarships, and made it to Olympic trials. I never got faster than B time standards. Coaches praised me for being tenacious and consistent, but those very qualities, though valued by many people, result in mediocrity.
These phenomenological paintings place the viewer in a meditative, isolated aquatic perspective. There they may contemplate the validity of possibly unattainable goals confronting them.