Heimar Schroeter - - - Underwater Life in Paintings

ART UNDERWATER, kindly written by Heimar Schroeter.

Introduction
Our guest blogger this week is Heimar Schroeter. Heimar is a German man who many years ago found his place in Ireland and so decided to move here and live in a wonderful corner of Connemara. He became a friend of the Aquarium because he is a ukulele player who has been involved in some Ocean inspired music projects we have carried on over the last year. But Heimar is also someone who has worked for years in advertisement and has deep passion and knowledge about art and art history, and with today's blog he will bring us with him in a mesmerising journey of discovery of some beautiful art pieces depicting life underwater.
Us at Galway Atlantaquaria strongly believe that art has a special power in helping us raise awareness about the importance of the Ocean for us all, so for this reason we will display the marine, nature or sustainability focused creations of two artists per month until the end of the year in the front windows of the building. Come and visit Galway Altantaquaria to discover some of the most beautiful art inspired by the Ocean produced in Galway and its surroundings!

​In my dream i was a diver. no no no. not one with flippers and snorkels.
a real diver. with metal boots and a brass helmet. 
And i was conducting a fish and lobster orchestra. with snails on harps.
We created the most beautiful music down there. 
 
By the time i brushed my teeth i wondered about the craziness.
It’s totally dark down there and there is no sound!
like in the aliens-movie: “in space nobody can hear you scream”.
but everything looked so real. 
Like Paul Klee’s “Fish Magic” painting.
(1925, surrealist, swiss-german).

​And all the surroundings looked like plasma in the wonderful arrangement by Wassily Kandinsky, “Composition 8”,
(1923, expressionist, Russian).

​Did they too have such a dream?
That day the news tells me about an upcoming auction of a painting by Pablo Picasso, “Femme nue couchée”.
His portrait of his lover Marie-Thérèse Walter showed her as an octopus. (1932).

​She was an avid and accomplished swimmer whose powerful, athletic grace in the water was a source of constant fascination for Picasso
(something that was perhaps all the more beguiling for him, given that - for all the time he spent on the beach as a child and subsequently - he in
fact never learned to swim).
The more i looked at the painting the more i was convinced that Marie-Thérèse has heard my underwater music too.
 
And than there is Yves Klein (1928 - 1962, french), an important figure in post-war European art.
The sky and the sea around Nice were his constant inspiration, so much so he created most of his work in “BLUE MONOCHROME”, (1961), 
the vivid, piercing almost hypnotic blue pigment became the sole component of his work. He saw this paintings as “an open window to freedom”.

​This blue was invented by Yves Klein. He called it 'International Klein Blue’ or IKB for short. the artist had it patented in France. 
In an early conceptual art attitude he sold his work for pure gold, that he then took out in a boat and sunk into the blue sea of Nice. 
 
I’m sure there was music in the air. and under water.