Rago Auctions

Throughout art history, who are the artists to have captured the refraction of figures that are immersed under water? Was Ashlock a principal innovator? This conundrum led to a search for precedents to Ashlock’s particular approach to abstraction. The further back one goes the more difficult are examples to locate. Certainly, art history reveals many paintings, dating back to the Renaissance, that catch the reflections of legs as the figure wades in shallow water. They have been captured on the surface, too, such as with Millet’s famous Ophelia, found floating. And Eakins scientifically studied and measured the reflections of his scullers on the water’s surface. Childe Hassam played with refraction in the still-life elements in several paintings — especially in his Bowl of Goldfish (1912, Ball State U. MOA) and The Goldfish Window (1916, Currier Gallery of Art).  

Rex Ashlock was a Figurative Expressionist who during the 1970s became fascinated by the special qualities of light and color uniquely produced by refraction when viewing nudes swimming from above. He appears to have been the first painter to create for himself the challenge of bringing those stimulating visual qualities to life. The result was a unique series of abstract paintings of seascapes and swimmers.

His first visual rule was that the body was to be viewed from above, so he always said he assumed the perspective of a seagull flying overhead. Such a perspective of the ocean’s surface conforms to the tenet of flatness inherent in abstraction as opposed to the viewpoint of a scuba diver viewing the swimmer from the side or from below. But even with the latter perspective, the diver’s mask would clearly eliminate any refraction. For the same reason, one must eliminate submersibles, first appearing in the 1880s — with no artists aboard.

But it appears that the visual task of capturing figures entirely immersed emerged with artists’ engagement with abstraction in the mid twentieth century. The realization of this new perspective and the urge to capture the fascinating qualities of light and color produced by refraction could well have dawned upon any painter or photographer standing atop a bridge observing a swimmer passing underneath. Perhaps the earliest example of an artist capturing a swimmer from above, fully submersed, is Kertesz’s photograph from 1917, Underwater Swimmer, Esztergom, Hungary.

The only contemporary painter to tackle the subject at the same time as did Ashlock was David Hockney — whose paintings of figures in his Los Angeles swimming pool spring to mind. Two very different treatments of the subject are his A Large Diver (Paper Pool), 1978; and, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with two figures), 1972.

Ashlock was a Figurative Expressionist with an abiding interest in the female figure. This led him to explore her while swimming. As the observer above the water’s surface, he looked down upon his female swimmers to capture how their bodies became naturally fragmented under water. It is as if he transformed DeKooning’s often violently expressive female figures into sensual forms, melting them into a myriad of soothing blue tones and facets.

—Peter Hastings Falk