Speak Up

Speak Up is an oil painting by the California-based artist Isabel Emrich, dated 2018 in the catalogue record. It belongs to her best-known series: images of women submerged in water, painted with thick, swirling brushstrokes that capture the way light bends and breaks underwater. In this canvas, a woman's face is seen close up beneath the surface, and a ring of air escapes from her open lips.

What you are looking at

The face fills the canvas. Dark hair spreads out around it into a field of bright turquoise water. The upper part of the face, eyes and forehead, is almost lost under bands of reflected light, rendered as wavy strokes of pink, lilac, cream and green, so that the woman seems to have no eyes at all. Below, the nose, parted lips and chin are clearer, and from her mouth rises a small ring of bubbles, painted as a loop of white and pale blue.

Her neck and shoulder are crossed by the same rippling network of light that plays on the bottom of a swimming pool on a sunny day. The paint is applied thickly and quickly, each stroke following the curve of the water's movement.

The ring of air is the key detail. It gives the painting its title: a breath that should become a word, released under water, where no one can hear it.

How it was made

Emrich works from her own photographs of models in swimming pools, then paints in oil with loaded brushes, building up impasto so that the surface itself ripples. Writers on her work have compared her energetic brushwork to Expressionism and to Van Gogh. The high-key palette, turquoise against warm skin, gives the pictures their intensity.

Meaning

Emrich's underwater women are often read as images of both freedom and pressure: weightless, absorbed, cut off from the noise of the world above, but also holding their breath. Speak Up sharpens that tension. The title can be read as an encouragement to speak, or as an ironic comment on how hard it is to be heard. Painted in 2018, at the height of public conversation about women speaking out, it invites that reading, though the artist has not, to our knowledge, published a statement about it.

The artist

Isabel Emrich is a young painter based in California who has exhibited with galleries in the United States, and was featured among Southwest Art's young artists to watch in 2017. Her pool paintings have circulated widely online. For other water imagery in the catalogue, see Ophelia, Hylas and the Nymphs and Undine Rising from the Waters.