Laurie Plant’s picture of the pool – available to buy now!

Cirencester Open Air Swimming Pool is very grateful to local artist, season ticket holder and regular swimmer Laurie Plant for donating a painting of the pool and for allowing us to sell prints in aid of the charity.

Laurie is a professional Cotswolds-based artist who works from a studio in Cirencester. He created this drawing while preparing for the Daniel George Bingham commission project and spent significant time at the Open Air Pool during this period.

Reflecting on the work, Laurie says:

“I made this study in preparation for the Daniel George Bingham commission project. I loved being at the Open Air Pool so much that I kept going back and learnt to swim and now love swimming! An exciting thing about this drawing is how the swimmers in the water transform the space. In isolation they look like scribble, but in the picture as a whole they make perfect sense.

It’s fairly easy to create a good photographic or topographic likeness of something. AI: Artificial Intelligence can do that brilliantly. But the real difficulty is to get past that likeness, to make it come alive. To give it energy. And whatever it is… I don’t know what it is, but it’s something, like those swimmers, that gives a painting a life of its own.”

The artwork beautifully captures not just the physical form of the pool, but the movement, atmosphere and sense of community created by the people who use it.

Prints of this painting are now available to purchase here, with all proceeds going directly towards supporting Cirencester Open Air Swimming Pool.

By buying a print, you are helping to secure the future of this much-loved community space while owning a unique piece of local art.

For further info and pictures from Laurie please visist his website.