Jim Schaefer - Conchita Series

I returned from a trip to a Mexican beach several years ago. I had just purchased my first digital camera and, with the freedom of not having to pay for film, had taken several hundred shots. I was almost sure I could make paintings from some of the shots of beaches and palm trees. But none of them looked too interesting. Then I noticed some shots of a woman entering the water, which I didn't remember having taken. They turned out to be great material to work from. The tentative, inhibited way in which she enters the water makes her a great model. Kind of the opposite of a "Pepsi generation" sort of picture with youthful babes frolicking in the surf. She has a sensitivity, perhaps a fear, apparent in her body language which I tried to capture in the paintings. I did the watercolors first, and liked them so much that I decided to make them into large canvases, something more solid and permanent.

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