Under Pressure: A New Mini Collection
Annette Price
Under Pressure
A Moment of Living Light
Imagine moving through absolute darkness, cold water pressing in around you, the only sound being the muffled rhythm of your own breathing. Then you raise your arms, and something extraordinary happens: the water around you fills with green sparkles. Not a reflection, not a trick of the light, but living light, produced by millions of microscopic organisms called bioluminescent plankton. Disturb the water and they respond, green sparks lighting up the water, following your every move. My dive buddy and I jumped up and down in the dark just to watch it happen, two grown adults in full commercial diving kit, giddy as children. Twenty years later, that moment is still with me, and it is the moment these paintings began.
How It Started
That experience goes back to 2005, when I was training as a commercial diver in Fort William, Scotland, as part of my Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust award (QEST) I was working at the time as an adventure and water sports photographer, telling stories about water and its relationship with land and people, taking me into all kinds of aquatic environments: diving, kayaking, caving, and wild and urban spaces where water shaped the world around it. I was also developing a new collection of underwater portraits. In the UK, working underwater for any client outside the recreational diving press requires a commercial qualification, so to the Underwater Centre in Fort William I went, in August, as the first female diver on the course that year. I loved every minute of it.
What the Darkness Taught Me
What has stayed with me most are the night dives. Working in pairs, heavy boots keeping us pinned to the loch floor, torch beams cutting through murky water, and that living light responding to every movement we made. There were also dives from a diving bell, descending to thirty metres, dark on the way down, then suddenly alive with colour and form the moment a torch beam swept across it. That contrast between darkness and sudden, electric light is what this collection is really about.
About the Paintings
Under Pressure is a series of fifteen small abstract paintings made in response to those dives. The strange, suspended world of night diving. Darkness, then sudden colour. A torch beam catching the flash of a fish. Moonlight travelling down through the water above you in slow, shifting threads. Each painting reaches for what that world feels like rather than what it looks like, which has always been the impulse behind my work.
Intimate and Expressive
The paintings are intimate in scale: 8 x 6 inches, acrylic on canvas board, some with gold leaf worked into them. I painted them in layers using brushes and palette knives, the palette knife allowing me to be direct and expressive in a way that felt right for these paintings. The edges are painted black, each painting is signed on the front, and the backs are neatly finished.
Whether this series grows into a larger body of work on bigger canvases, I don't yet know, but these fifteen pieces feel like the beginning of a conversation rather than its conclusion.
Find Them A Home
At £140 each, they are priced to find homes rather than wait in my portfolio. I think they would be happy in a cozy corner of a room, or given as a present to someone who would find joy in something small and genuinely original. Each one has been varnished and will arrive wrapped in glassine to protect the surface, then in blue tissue paper and ribbon, a certificate of authenticity, and a handwritten thank you note from me.
There are currently fifteen paintings in this collection, with five more in progress that will join them soon. They began with arms waving through dark water and an unexpected sparkling light. I hope something catches your eye.
