Jamie Wayman remembers her first attempt at painting the undulating, quicksilver world of underwater images. It was fall 2001, and she was living in student housing at the University of Utah.

Working with fast-drying acrylic paint, her brush strokes required unusual speed. The finished product came fast, too, at just under 30 minutes.

The experience felt so good, Wayman found herself painting canvas after canvas, stacking one on top of another.

Wayman switched from acrylic to oil for a more relaxed pace soon after, but the parallels between brush strokes and breast strokes has carried the Bountiful-based swimmer and painter from strength to strength.

"You really have to immerse yourself into it," she said. "To really be good at it takes everything. It has to become part of your life."

It helps, too, when dual affections feed into one another has they have for Wayman, 30. Catching the eye of Karen Horne, owner of Salt Lake City's Horne Fine Art gallery, the gallery hosted Wayman's second public exhibition in 2003. The same gallery will open an exhibition of her newest works, "Making a Splash," in an exhibition opening Sept. 4 and continuing through Oct. 9.

"She had a formed, mature viewpoint almost from the beginning," Horne said. "A lot of young artists really struggle to find that."

It makes sense that water images are an inspiration for Wayman, who grew up splitting her time between school art classes and four hours of daily swim practice at the neighborhood pool. When she enrolled at the University of Utah on a swimming scholarship fall of 1997, a career in art struck her as too "exotic." She enrolled in more pragmatic classes, but art kept calling. She kept her sketchbook nearby at the pool, and during swim-meet breaks, she drew figures of her teammates. It wasn't until her junior year that she relented, deciding to earn a BFA in painting.

John Erickson, an auxiliary instructor of painting at the department, remembers Wayman as a student with enthusiasm as wide as her learning curve was steep. When she took to painting water and pool scenes, however, Erickson could see that Wayman had found her subject.

Since she couldn't take her sketchbook into the pool, Erickson encouraged Wayman to take photographs under water for later replication on canvas. That's when her work took off.

"I was jealous," Erickson said. "Her paintings were blowing my mind. I wanted to get a piece of that action."

Taking his own disposable camera and swimming trunks up to the HYPER swimming pool where Wayman led the U. swim team, Erickson joined the artist-swimmer and her husband for an underwater photo shoot.

"Water challenges our expectations of how reality should be," Erickson said. "Its distorting and reflective nature is hard to capture, and it plays a lot of tricks. What's so beguiling and charming about Jamie's work is all its visual surprises."

Recipient of the esteemed Ethel Armstrong Rolapp award during her student days, Wayman graduated in 2002 with a BFA in painting. Raising two children with her pharmacist-husband, Wayman returned to her home-town of Bountiful. The whole of her work, she said, is a visual journal of all that's important to her life. All the works for her new exhibition feature friends and family members.

While her early works on large canvases employed darker hues, her new series on small and mid-size canvases are shot through with vibrant azure tones, sun-kissed dashes of white and flesh colors, and dappled play of light. "Pool Party," an underwater scene of two swimmers floating by inflatable rings, is so real-to-life you can almost feel the tips of your fingers start to prune from too much pool-time.

"There were always things I saw while swimming that I loved," Wayman said. "The only challenge is finding time to paint them all."