Pictures and Poems and Legs

Yesterday I made this painting of a young girl plunging into a pool. I had drawn the pool and the splash and the legs and had taken a break when I came across a photograph Maria Popova posted to accompany a poem by Mario Benedetti, called Do Not Spare Yourself. The photograph is of an unidentified young girl leaping onto the beach. When I turned the photo upside down, the similarity of legs was uncanny.

I once visited the painter Paul Hamlyn in his London studio. He was painting large canvases of upside down landscapes. He had a pin board covered in pictures, all hung upside down. I think of him whenever I turn a picture 180 degrees. It’s useful to try to see things differently.

Turning back to my painting, I added the socks and shoes, borrowed from the unidentified girl. Not long after I laid it aside, another picture I had clipped long ago caught my eye. Giotto’s Jonah and the Whale from around 1305.

I sent this intriguing confluence of images to my friend, and she sent me back Landscape with the Fall of Icarus which is maybe by Bruegel, or maybe it’s a copy of a Bruegel, from around 1560.

In either case, if you look closely, beyond the ploughman bent upon his work, beyond the shepherd lost in thought, beyond the angler, testing his line, are the inverted legs of Icarus, plunging into the sea.

Icarus, who flew too close to the sun, fell into the water and drowned, but I prefer to think he is playing Hey Presto. This is a handstand game we played as kids in the turquoise shallows of the Southern Ocean. One person would call, Hey… and the others would plunge upside down, extending our legs above the surface. Hey Presto meant legs together, but there were many variations: Hey Scissors, Hey Spaghetti, Hey Bicycle… With our hands planted on the sea floor, our bodies under water, we communicated ideas with our legs.

The leaping girl in the photograph is unidentified, but the photograph was taken by Sam Hood, some time in the 1930s, in South Australia (I discovered with astonishment) a few miles from where I grew up.

Here she is, reverted. Suspended in air and in time.

None of this is terribly significant. But I like the way we have tried for centuries—and continue to try—to make sense of the world around us, right side up and upside down, through pictures and poems and legs.