Jim Schaefer - Fish

Sometime in the late 80's, I took up scuba diving and eventually did dive trips to places such as San Salvador in the Bahamas, Cabo San Lucas, Mexico and Glover's Reef, Belize. Underwater photo shots provided material for various paintings of fish, coral, divers and snorkelers. The underwater perspective is somewhat confounding to a traditional landscape painter. The first question is, "Where is the horizon?" The answer usally is, "Nowhere to be seen.", as it is obscured by the progressively obscuring effects of water, similar to a thick fog in a landscape. This leaves the artist free to arrange a composition such as Angel Fish or Lisetas (below) over the entire surface of the canvas unconstrained by the logic of where things go with respect to the horizon line. Belize Fish has an implied horizon which we can't quite see. In the weightless underwater world, fish float freely above it.

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