Artist May Have Found Her Place in the Sun

Helen Redman’s striking mural of sun worshipers may shake up eastbound G Street commuters.

Painted in brilliant acrylic colors on canvas and installed on the 8th Street side of the 9-G Art Complex, “Sun Seekers” radiates with the energy of bold color while it satirizes California’s cult of the body.

Redman portrays a gaggle of San Diego’s hard bodies attired in colorful and skimpy bathing wear. Lounging amid a jumble of beach chairs or swimming in a sun-drenched pool, the muscular poolside habitues are in various stages of tan--from bronze to golden to screaming neon pink to hardened dark leather.

Redman’s mural, which will be up through May 28, is part of this weekend’s Artwalk, an annual self-guided tour of artists’ studios, galleries and visual art-related activities.

For Redman, a former Coloradan who is better known in her native state for her character probing portraits, the attraction of Southern California’s vaunted athleticism was an irresistible challenge.

“This whole physicality out here is what I’m responding to,” said Redman, a vivacious woman whose laughter spills out at regular intervals. “I’m a very serious person, but (here) I’ve become totally superficial.”

A youthful grandmother just shy of 50, Redman started her poolside series of paintings after moving here three years ago with her husband, a rock music promoter. She swims as therapy for a back injury. Sneaking into pools at an Oakwood apartment complex, she discovered swimming and tanning devotees who congregate around the pools even in the middle of winter.

“People aren’t so up-tight out here about their bodies,” she said. At the Oakwood, she found “this incredible singles scene and in the midst of all that, retired people . . . and someone who may be terrifically overweight wearing this wild bathing suit. It’s not like in the East.”

In Colorado, Redman did her swimming indoors. Here, her artist’s eye discovered the startling impact of the sun while swimming outdoors.

“Swimming underwater, there’s this voyeuristic thing: watching patterns and light, light refraction, and you can see people with crystal clarity. It practically knocks your eyeballs out. You can’t see people the same way indoors. The whole intensity of the color is different.”

After a swim, Redman would get out and make sketches, including “fantasy combinations, realistic combinations.” She researched today’s patterns and colors in swimsuit catalogues and became generally “obsessesed” with the water and the swimming pool cult.

Redman’s outdoor paintings of “anonymous bodies” stands in bold relief against her other interest in portraiture where she is “very much involved with people’s character. When I’m doing a portrait, I’m after something very essential in a person. I get so involved with them . . . it’s like an investigative reporter.”

She spends lengthy periods with her portrait subjects, interviewing them, following them around the house and even going through their closets.

But her San Diego poolside series, including “Sun Seekers,” funded by the City of San Diego’s Public Arts Advisory Board, is a completely different type of art.

“Out here, it’s their body and image,” she said. “But I really love (San Diego). There’s a part of San Diego that I’m very much into--the physicality and the ease of life.”