Ukraine has a national school of underwater painting, a thing most of us probably didn’t previously think was a thing, because how do you get paint to be paint underwater? The members of said school, the underwater artists, are all trained scuba divers, and work at depths from anywhere between 2 and 20 feet. The diver’s canvases are usually covered in a waterproof adhesive coating before they are taken underwater, so at least something unique is being done to either the paint or canvases to make the process work.
The deeper a diver goes, the more color is lost, so the divers have to develop an eye for what a color will look like when the painting is taken out of the depths of the sea — for instance, red may look brown or black the further underwater a diver travels. And yes, paintings are known to take quite a while to complete, whereas oxygen tanks aren’t known to last very long, which is why the divers only have around 40 minutes to complete their paintings before they run out of air. Like some artsy version of Saw.
(euronews via Oddity Central, paintings by Alexander Belozor and photos by Andrey Shmatova)
- Edible spray paint
- Long exposure light paintings made with Roombas
- Artist buys landscape paintings from yard sales, inserts monsters
