Underwater Colors

Painters have ransacked the heavens and earth for inspiration, recorded the sea in all its moods, discovered the bird's-eye view centuries before the airplane. Only recently has the artist begun trying to conquer a new world--the vast reaches under the sea. Last month Canadian-born Marcel Cardinal. 38, now busily skindiving for fresh impressions off the French Riviera, exhibited his underwater seascapes in London's Matthiesen Gallery. This week Russell Swanson, 29, a U.S. skindiver, is displaying his water-soaked paintings in Philadelphia's William C. Blood gallery. For both, the underwater world is an overwhelming experience of fantastic otherworldly beauty.

Marcel Cardinal, an ex-commando captain, began underwater exploration out of curiosity, rapidly became an addict. He took to carrying a sketchbook with him to the Cannes beach, would plunge into the deep blue sea off the Cote d'Azur, then flipper to the surface to jot down notes. Worked up first in watercolor and finally in oils, his paintings evoke the mysterious transparency of undersea scenes where objects--a ship's hull, rock outcropping--loom more evocatively than their above-the-surface counterparts.

Russell Lee Swanson, an ex-G.I. with training at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and Merion, Pa.'s Barnes Foundation, started out as a science-fiction bug, was converted to the submarine world almost as soon as he donned his first face mask five years ago at Star Island, N.H. Says Swimmer Swanson: "Why bother going into space or to another planet when there is another world right beneath the waves, and one that is much more accessible in my lifetime." Unlike Cardinal, who sketches on dry land, Swanson has worked out a technique for drawing and coloring underwater. He uses a waterproof Japanese oil-base pastel stick on a specially coated paper often stiffened with spar varnish to keep it from wrinkling.

The rewards for the deepsea plunger. Swanson finds, are great and varied: "In northern waters the general atmosphere of the sea is rather somber, a deep mystical green, like a dark cathedral. In tropical waters the colors are overwhelming, like a gaudy festival." Swanson has discovered that underwater one can work over, around and sometimes under the subject matter. "The problems,'' he likes to muse, ''may be comparable to those man will have when he begins to draw in outer space."

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