Quest: An Underwater Painting of Movement, Reflection, and Return

My painting Quest began with a video: a young woman, filmed by her brother, dives into Lake Michigan, disappears into the green depths, and resurfaces. The footage drew me in—not just for the motion, but for its searching, almost mythic quality.

From that video, I selected three frames: one of her diving downward (shown here), one where she balances on one leg on the sandy lake bottom, and one where she ascends toward the surface. Each frame had that distinctive underwater quality—cool tones, softened edges, and a blurred, shifting glow, as if seen through layers of water. I used these three stills to create a digital 2-by-4-foot montage, which became the basis for my painting.

– In my first version of the painting, I included two additional scenes: one on the surface before the dive, and another just after she broke back through the water into air, triumphant.

 While working on the painting, I gave the diving photo to a high school student who was learning to code. Using a statistical coding language, he instructed the computer to scan each pixel in the image and group similar colors into ten categories—shown here in vivid, simplified tones. This playful, brightly colored version inspired me to experiment with the bolder palette you see in the final painting.

Now we are looking at the final completed version of Quest:

Gustav Klimt, the late 19th- to  early 20th century Austrian painter had a major impact on this work. Klimt often rendered women’s skin in what I’d call a marbled manner, using subtle, luminous patches of color. It inspired me to paint the figure’s skin – surrounded by blue water – in a similar patchy way, using purple and bluish-green pigments.

Instagram has played an important role as well. The artist Michelmoz influenced how I approached the upper part of this painting, where the woman’s body reflects against the water’s surface. Michelmoz photographs her daughter from the bottom of a swimming pool, capturing the reflection on the underside of the surface.  Inspired by this technique, I merged two perspectives in my own work: the real-world view from an iPhone only just  below the water’s surface and an imagined underwater photograph tracing the woman’s reflection from the sand upwards. This dual perspective allowed  me to emphasize both the distortion and the depth of water, anchoring the painting entirly within the underwater realm.

The downward motion of the diver is emphasized by a trail of air bubbles, the upward motion, by the spirals surrounding her. I was now faced with the challenge of integrating the middle pose—where she balances on one leg on the lake bottom—with the downward and upward movements. Part of this challenge involved merging the cool tones of the water with the warm colors of the sand. One idea was to show sand swirling upward from where her foot disturbs the lakebed, connecting to the ascending figure. Using ChatGPT, I explored the physics of underwater sand displacement when struck by a rock. But those images didn’t resonate with me visually, so instead I painted red circles radiating from her foot, blending into the spiraling motion of the upward-moving figure.

At first, I had simply thought of this painting as Diving. But as I worked on the motif—on and off over the course of two years—it gradually began to speak to something larger. The figure’s movement no longer felt like just a dive into water, but a journey: venturing out, searching for something, and returning home—much like my own interaction with the sources of inspiration. That’s when the idea of a Quest emerged. It reflects not just the physical motion, but a process of exploration, discovery, and return—something I recognized both in the image and in myself as I kept revisiting the work.

A quest can take many forms: inventing a recipe, training for a race, writing a book, or painting. It’s a deeply personal search—for meaning, for mastery, or simply for the joy of the process.

I don’t expect viewers to follow the same path I did, but I hope Quest offers a sense of immersion—a moment of suspension between descent and return. Perhaps it evokes a memory, a feeling of searching, or simply the rhythm of movement itself. Like any true quest, its meaning isn’t fixed. It reveals itself differently to each person who enters the image.

This painting was accepted into the 2025 Northwest Michigan Regional Juried Exhibition, which is held every few years. My artist talk, Quest: Underwater Motion Becomes Transformation, was presented at the Dennos Museum Center on May 25, 2025.

To see more of my work, visit @birgitzipser.paint on Instagram