Sarah Harvey’s Hyperrealistic Paintings of Swimming Ladies

April 7, 2011

Sarah Harvey‘s paintings might look like distorted underwater photos, but they’re not — in most cases, they are self-portraits that the London-based artist creates using images shot by a third party that she later digitally manipulates, changing colors and swapping limbs. “I gain a great amount of freedom from being able to give each girl in each painting a different personality,” Harvey has explained. “In some ways, I see them as self-portraits due to the obvious fact that they are of me, but I love how I can live out fantasies, curiosities and narratives through my paintings that I’m not able to in real life.” Click through to check out a gallery of her work.