Artist finds her inspiration in a close call long ago

When the shouts and the screams faded away and she was alone out on the water where the rip current had carried her, Cheryl Dyment thought back to what she’d been taught in swimming lessons years earlier. The teenager lay on her back and floated.

The sun made the water sparkle like diamonds, and she could see the curvature of the earth. “I can smile when I think about it. [Floating] was a beautiful thing. I never felt scared; I never felt panicked. I was just appreciating being in the moment, I guess.’’

At least until an arm came out of nowhere and tried to grab her. The arm belonged to a lifeguard, who helped her back to shore with the aid of a tow rope and probably saved her life. According to Dyment’s recollection, several other people were also caught in the current on that sunny day in August 1969 at Good Harbor Beach in Gloucester, and one drowned. But she shook it off and went on with her life.

It wasn’t until 2009 that she realized how profound her experience alone on the ocean had been. A successful landscape painter in oils, she was used to beginning her paintings on scene, “en plein air.’’ But she changed track one day in her home studio in Middleton and decided to paint from memory a floater’s-eye-view image of sky and water.

That painting, “Regression (or the Day I Didn’t Drown),’’ was quickly followed by more. Now they make up the bulk of her exhibition, “The Importance of Floating and Other Lessons,’’ which opens at the Firehouse Center for the Arts in Newburyport on Wednesday and runs through March 11.

The Good Harbor experience, she said, is “like this place that I can go back to, like a well, and just pull stuff out.’’

Told that the ripples at the center of “Regression’’ make it appear that she has, indeed, gone under, Dyment, who is 61, shrugged and smiled. “I was supported by the water,’’ she said, “but I felt like I was of the water.’’

Dyment grew up in Melrose. She and her friend, Mary Garden, then both 19, figured they could enjoy a warm Saturday at their favorite beach. Dyment brought along her 10-year-old sister, Beverly. Mary, who drove, brought her brother, Eddie, also 10. Eventually they left the kids to play on the sand and headed into the water.

Dyment soon felt the current pulling her away from shore. Remembering a safety lesson, she tried to swim parallel to it, but kept getting pulled away. She heard Mary getting pulled under, but what really scared her was when some “grown men’’ nearby began screaming for rescue as well.