Anna Vaivare: Swimming Pool

I found this small format book in our letterbox some time ago, and it is a real pleasure to finally show this little treasure on the blog today. The artist and illustrator Anna Vaivare lives and works in Riga, Latvia. Apart from drawing, she likes to spend time in the forest watching trees from below and walking long distances. You can feel both of these things in her work — a quiet, observant gaze and a willingness to look at familiar scenes from unexpected angles.

Swimming Pool (DIN A6, 28 pages, English text) was published in the mini kuš! series. kuš!, pronounced “koosh!”, is Latvia’s premier indie comics publisher, founded in Riga in 2007. Their stated aim is to popularise comics in Latvia and abroad, and every issue of the kuš! anthology gathers work by international and Latvian artists. They also run exhibitions, workshops and jams, and their catalogue is well worth getting lost in.

I have been a fan of Anna Vaivare from the first time I saw her bold, energetic colour work. The drawings in Swimming Pool are warm and a little melancholy. The book follows the inner monologue of a cleaner working at a public pool. She thinks about her job, the swimmers she watches from the side, the way light falls on the tiles. On the last pages she tells us a small secret of her own.

What I love most is that nothing in the story really happens, and yet so much does. The pool becomes a kind of stage for thinking, and the cleaner becomes someone you would like to sit next to. Tiny books like this one are why I keep coming back to independent comics — they take a quiet idea and let it bloom inside very few pages.