Anna Vaivare: Swimming Pool (a few more pages)

A short follow-up to the previous post on Anna Vaivare’s Swimming Pool: a few of you wrote in asking to see more pages from inside the book, so I am sharing some here. The mini kuš! format is so small that you almost want to look at every spread to feel how the rhythm builds.

Anna Vaivare draws with a confident, slightly wobbly line and a palette that always feels like a sunny afternoon — even when the subject is a melancholy one. In Swimming Pool she is following the inner monologue of a cleaner who works at the local pool. The cleaner observes the swimmers, the children, the empty lanes early in the morning, the way the steam rises off the water, and slowly we begin to feel that the pool is not just a place she visits for work. It is a place that holds something for her.

What I keep noticing in these extra pages is how Vaivare uses unusual angles. We look up at people from the tile floor; we look down at a swimmer through the water; we look sideways across a row of lockers. None of the panels feel obvious. Every page asks the eye to find its own way in.

If you want to find out more about the kuš! mini comics series, the publisher in Riga keeps a wonderful catalogue on their website. The little books cost very little and arrive in a small envelope, which makes opening them feel like a private gift. Swimming Pool is a perfect place to start if you have never read one before, and Anna Vaivare’s other work is just as good.