Pacy strokes on canvas to capture sports in action

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Sport gets it real expression in live action, with spectators watching the ultimate spectacle in stadia or gazing at their television screens. The only popular recorded action of sporting action is photography.

In contrast, the connection of sport with painting is tentative and tremulous, mostly overlooked. However, with the Olympic fever peaking everywhere in Britain, artists are actively exploring and depicting connection between art and sport.
British-American artist Sarah Butterfield is exhibiting in London her paintings of athletes and sportspersons hard at practise for the Olympic Games across different venues in Britain.
Visions of Gold 2012 is an exhibition of some 50-odd paintings, priced between £4,750 and £750, and even has a ringing endorsement from Lord Coe, the London Olympics chief, who bought a sports painting from Sarah.
“I went to Loughborough University to find athletes, Crystal Palace for divers, Putney Embankment for rowers, the Hampshire coast for sailing and Portsmouth for gymnasts,” reveals the artist, who is married to UK minister for universities and science David Willetts.
“I had to go and see the athletes and sportspersons for myself, I couldn’t rely on anybody else’s drawings or photographs. I needed to see them in action myself to paint,” she says, adding that her interest in athletics and tennis since her school days gave her a better perspective on capturing sporting acting in water-colour and then in oil paintings.
“I have always been passionate about painting of human figure. I was very athletic when I was younger and I had played a lot of tennis and had done a lot running and swimming, so it was something I could identify with. My work has been described as a mix of serenity and explosiveness and that is because of the way I paint, which is called alla prima. I do it all at one go — get colours, shadow, the essence of the picture all at one go. Trying to paint all at one go isn’t different from capturing a moment, and artist just tries and draws on anything from personal experiences that helps them nail something.”
Sarah says a recent exhibition of French impressionist Edgar Degas, famous for pioneering paintings of movement, especially dancers, helped her analyse his working methods and his use of lighting, which helped her in her conceptualisation of paintings of sportspersons.
Having painted a range of sportspersons in training, Sarah reveals that painting gymnasts was the toughest of all. “It needs to be captured in balance — balancing their torso with their legs. If you got it wrong then the picture would not look balanced.
“You can sense the pull of gravity and the transfer of all the gymnasts’ body weight from one limb to the other. Unbelievably, the very light falling vertically from the skylights above reminds us of gravity too, as it falls on the small of a gymnasts’ back — the direction of gravity and the direction of light reinforce each other,” she reveals.
Admitting that there is not much depiction of sport in art, Sarah, however, says there is a close connection and there are many deep parallels in the practice of the both. “Art and art about sport is all about human figure — what it can achieve and what it can do,” she says.
Keen to paint the Olympic action, Sarah, who was commissioned to paint the Thames Pageant during the Queen’s Jubilee, is trying to get permission to be able to capture the Olympics in her paintings while watching sporting action in a stadium. “I would love to capture pole vault athletes during the Olympics,” she says.