And, once in a while, reality intrudes: In one painting, an ankle is vaguely topographic, taking the shape of Coral Springs, Florida, where a black girl was beaten by policemen. It freed me up to improvise.” Arms disintegrate into pieces. “A body moving through water creates these areas that are very abstract-real and yet unbelievable. “I stopped being so realistic in my painting,” she says. Rawles deliberately roughs up the water during her photo shoots (done in a friend’s pool in L.A., with her iPhone snug in a waterproof case), and says that the agitation has released her creatively.

Her black bodies are islands of innocence surrounded by raging forces. The exhibition, called “A Dream for My Lilith” with a nod to the Biblical character “demonized for wanting to be equal,” as Rawles puts it, celebrates the power of individual strength and self-composure in a time of racial and political turmoil.

While their faces seem serene, the water around them is -turbulent, swirling with currents and eddies. The paintings show figures submerged, including black girls in white, baptismal-looking dresses. Now, from February 12 to March 14, Rawles is having her first solo show at the gallery Various Small Fires, which also decided to showcase her work at the Frieze Los Angeles art fair. Then last year, Ta-Nehisi Coates, her friend from their student days-well before he became one of America’s leading intellectuals, praised by Toni Morrison and compared to James Baldwin-used her paintings on the jacket of his new novel, The Water Dancer. She didn’t devote herself full-time to art until 2015, when she began making paintings based on her own photographs of people underwater.

in painting at New York University, Rawles kept up her artmaking in her 30s in Los Angeles-while working mainly as a graphic designer-by doing hyperrealistic portraits. She also discovered something else: an important subject for her work.Ī graduate of Spelman College who got her M.A. The artist Calida Rawles, 43, discovered this sensation and the sense of peace that comes with it when she started swimming laps for exercise seven years ago. The hubbub of the world becomes a pulsating hush, something in between silence and sound-almost like hearing the rhythms of our own bodies amplified. There’s nothing quite like the quiet of being underwater.

Ta nehisi the water dancer