Nancy Farmer
Inspired by her wild swimming adventures, Nancy Farmer decided to immortalise her swims as drawings. She soon discovered that people were delighted to be caught in her sketchbook
An
early morning swim, startling the Environment Agency at work, was the first event that seemed worthy of immortalising into a drawing.
We had planned to meet in a little
carpark by the River Sowy, a manmade
channel across the Somerset Levels,
rural and peaceful. When we got there
a very large part of the carpark was
occupied by a mountain of gravel
which hadn’t been there the previous
week. So we tucked our cars around it,
and went swimming.
Some time later, following the
appearance of the first digger, and
a sprint swim back to our point of
entry, the Environment Agency were a
little surprised to see a grown woman
suddenly appear, soaking wet and
dressed in only a swimming costume,
in the middle of their temporary
building site. “Hello… ah… sorry, are
the cars in your way?” The digger-
driver stared and blinked, and finally
mustered a shake of his head. “Ok,
thanks, back in a bit…” The grown
woman tiptoed back across the nettles
and plopped back out of sight into the
river.
That was how I knew the
Environment Agency had begun its
flood-defence work on that part of the
Levels: I caught them at it. But they
were very nice, if a little nonplussed,
and finally as we were dressing again in
the once-quiet but now uncomfortably
busy little car park, one man succeeded
in finding the words of the immortal
question that all land-based people ask
those rash enough to swim outside in
this country: “Is it cold?”
This was July of 2014 and no, it was
not cold. But there were not many
months before it was. A memorable
lack of a properly planned exit strategy at the head of Wast Water,
me still a relative newbie suddenly
in charge of a rather cold girl, and
my brother appearing from nowhere
with miraculous shoes: these were the
elements of the next scene that I drew.
From memory and imagination, and
this time I drew people, not mermaids.
Increasingly surprised at my own
persistent failure to put on a wetsuit,
before the end of that winter I had
discovered a respectable ability to deal
with cold, several new friends and a
healthy number of cake recipes.
I was a self-employed artist
before I began the swimming
drawings, so I already spent
quite a lot of time drawing
and painting, but meanwhile
back in my studio, the ultra-
connected world of social
media favours niches, and
finding an audience for my
pictures went hand-in glove
with finding soulmates willing to
swim in darkest January in a lake at
6 degrees, and more source material
for my pictures.
Do not expect to have a work-life
balance if you are a self-employed
artist, it is impossible for me to
even tell if I am working or playing
anymore, it is all one: I study clouds
and note seagulls as I swim, and try to
remember the exact silty yellow-brown
of the waters of the Bristol Channel,
in case I want to describe them later; a
day out to the coast may well result in
‘homework’ as I scribble the mood of
the swim and the scene before it is lost.
I’d been through a whole year of swimming outside as a regular thing:
beginning in the chilly waters of
Clevedon Marine Lake on a beautiful
April day, I’d swum through the
summer, the winter, and back through the summer again, I’d shed mywetsuit (with which I’d always had an uneasy relationship), and I
had a respectable collection of swimming drawings descriptive of the seasons as well as swims alone and with friends, notable events and silly ideas. So I compiled 12 of them, with their captions which are almost part of the drawings, into an illustrated calendar arranged by
appropriate season. This was more to please myself than with any great expectation of selling many: almost a vanity project. To my surprise I soldabout 300. That was last year. This year I have a new collection on offer, and I’m experimenting with that most niche-market of products: wrapping paper for swimmers. I have also designed t-shirts for two of Chillswim’s events, and drawn a number of fellow swimmers’ portraits as commissions. The annexation of my artwork by my swimming habit is almost complete, and I have loved every minute of it!