Along A Long Line » Arctic

Arctic Paintings, Done.

mGlier — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 01:22:00 +0000

I’ve been home in Hoosick, New York for the month of September and have had a chance to look at the Arctic paintings in the luxury of a well-lit, spacious studio instead of a dim, small bedroom. The improved circumstances have led to small changes in the pictures posted below. The title of each painting includes the date that the work was begun, the temperature of the moment, the latitude and longitude of the place, and a verbal description of the subject that motivated the painting. The paintings are in oil on 24″ x 30″ aluminum panels, except for two smaller works which are noted.

New posts from Jatun Sacha Reserve in the equatorial forest of Ecuador will begin in October.

“June 27, 2007, 48º,N66°13 W65°75, Rock Slide”. 12″ x 16″

“June 29, 2007, 49°F, N66°13 W65°75, River Ice”

“July 9, 2007, 45°, N66°13 W65°75, Pink Granite”

“July 11, 2007, 50°F, N66°13 W65°75, Waterfall”

“July 12, 2007, 47°F, N66°13 W65°75, Lichen”

Detail of “July 12, 2007, 47°F, N66°13 W65°75, Lichen ”

“July 18, 2007, 48°F, N66°13 W65°75, Red Moss”

“July 21, 2007, 40°F, N66°13 W65°75, Fog”

Detail of “July 21, 2007, 40°F, N66°13 W65°75, Fog ”

“July 25, 2007, 41°F, N66°13 W65°75, Pangnirtung Fiord ”

“July 28, 2007, 48°, N66°13 W65°75, Clouds and Moss”

“August 9, 2007, 48°, N66°13 W65°75, River Rocks”

“August 10, 2007, 47°, N66°13 W65°75, Mount Duval”

Detail, “August 10, 2007, 47°, N66°13 W65°75, Mount Duval”

“August 11, 2007, 48°, N66°13 W65°75, High Tundra”

“August 12, 2007, 48°, N66°13 W65°75, Hill, Stream and Fiord”

“August 16, 2007, 45º, N66°13 W65°75, Evening”. 12″ x 16″

Mount Duval

mGlier — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 19:51:00 +0000

In the body of Pavarotti, I opened my eyes. The bedroom was two-storied, made of stone and sparsely furnished with substantial, Baroque furniture. I rose from bed and walked up the steps to the balcony which overlooked a piazza where a crowd had gathered. I opened my mouth and sang with the perfection that comes when technical control and emotional abandon merge into one thing. With sound I expressed every feeling that any person has ever had and with my voice I transformed the crowd into a single, ecstatic being. Then I woke up a second time, as me, alone in a double bed with flannel sheets and I was happy.

Carrying the fantasy that virtuosity can unite humanity as well as satisfy the ego, I hiked up the guardian of Pangnirtung, Mount Duval, to end my Arctic adventure.

At the foot of the mountain I stopped many times to admire the Arctic Cotton, and other late blooming plants.

As I moved up the slope, the footing changed and I stepped from jumbles of bruising rocks onto planes of dry lichens that crunched like fried noodles.

With other steps I sank into brilliant, green tubs of sodden moss that filled with water at the pressure of my foot only to spring back into shape as I moved past.

Boulders, unlatched from the mountain, pressed into the ground to demonstrate their weight or perched on promontories to express their potential.

Black-bottomed water courses, large and small, streamed over the surface reflecting a deep shade of sapphire too blue to be the sky.

Over the course of hours the sun lowered to describe the land with great volumes of shadow. In all this glory, I thought, “I’m sure glad I’m not trying to paint realistically”.

At this unguarded moment painting “realistically” meant the ambition to faithfully record detail, and to minimize interpretation so that the thing being observed is captured fresh and whole. Of course it is impossible to package the complexity of an experience like hiking Mt. Duval and deliver it fresh and whole, but I’m often troubled by the thought that I’m a fraud unless I can deliver no less. This fear is real and it often dictates that I paint in secluded spots to avoid exposure as a faker. With dread I imagine the moment that a stranger approaches, looks at a half-finished picture and asks, “What is that supposed to be?” If hell is self-imagined, then “What is that supposed to be?” will crown the gates. In this fantasy, the question is not really a question but a judgment. The stranger has asserted that the art is Poorly Observed. Badly Recorded. Self-indulgent. Uncommunicative. In other words the artist, formerly known as Pavarotti, has failed.

Continuing to the summit of Mount Duval, I rested and enjoyed a small bag of cookies and cashews.

The summit is dotted with Inuksuit, stone constructions that mark trails and caches of food for travelers. More poetically, Inuksuit in the shape of doors or windows were positioned with the opening faced toward home, so that Inuit hunters, lonely for family and friends, could sit in the window and transport themselves mentally to their loved ones. *

On the way home I flirted with the sheer, western edge of Mount Duval, which drops 2200 feet to the fiord below. A spectacular drop from which one could fly, briefly, is always an occasion for a quick assessment. With the deep space spectacle of Pangnirtung Fiord before me and the inscriptions of time on the rocks around me, I took stock of what I had learned by painting in the Baffin Island landscape. First, I can’t begin to tell the whole story. Second, that being true, I can tell a good story by reducing color, light and form to their essentials. As for color, there is not much red here, but a lot of orange, which ranges from flaming, to rusty, to pale salmon. In the early spring the land is tan, but as the weather warms, it shifts to olive and gold. The blue of the sky is often cool and pale and is best described by adding a little thalo green (a very cold and powerful color) to the usual recipe for sky. Contrasts of light and dark are strong in the Arctic and there are countless shades of black and white to employ. Although Arctic Poppies, a cheerful and ubiquitous yellow flower, were painted into several scenes, they were in the end erased, because they detracted from the essential soberness and grandness of the open, treeless space. Besides the occasional boulder and caribou, few things are middle sized. Instead a vast, living carpet of infinite detail and texture clings to massive convexities and concavities. Ovals and hemispheres are common forms and angular lines are as abundant as long curves. The circulation of water from air to land to sea is a constant subject and the transformations of water into fog, drizzle, torrent, tide, and ice
are always interesting. Time seems long here, since it is marked by glacial scrapings and ancient ice caps, but the pace is becoming more modern as the glaciers melt and the sea ice retreats.

These observations are a part of the inventory of thoughts from which the Arctic paintings were made. This same inventory included comic dreams of artistic prowess and comic visions of artistic humiliation, but these two items were selected infrequently since the inventory was stuffed with more fascinating things like

fancy boulders

and Arctic mushrooms on Mount Duval.

*”Inuksuit: Silent Messengers of the Arctic”, by Norman Hallendy, published by Douglas and McIntyre Ltd., 2000, is an excellent source of images and information on the stone structures of Baffin Island.

Walking Past the Summer Solstice

mGlier — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 02:29:00 +0000

Every thirteen days darkness takes an hour of light from Pangnirtung. The slide toward the arctic night has started and the change is quick since 24 hours of daylight must be shed before the winter solstice. I’m subtly bothered by the change, like I’ve left the house and forgotten something, but can’t remember what.

Although the light is changing quickly, the days have a routine. Once a week I walk into town to pick up mail and buy groceries.

On the way I see a few handsome sled dogs.

But mostly I see short-legged, hard-working mutts.

Kids don’t seem to frequent the school grounds during the summer.

Instead, the young ones play in the empty spaces between the houses. Private yard space defined by sidewalks, lawn edges and fences does not exist; kids play under any window and adults cut through any yard to make the shortest path to their destinations.

Older girls and boys run in separate groups. The girls do not look at me or speak to me, but the boys are a different story. A pack of boys shot a hole in my living room window with a BB gun. When I spoke to them, they seemed surprised that aiming a gun at a house could have a consequence. Another pack thought it would fun to throw stones at me while I was working at the bottom of a rock slide. They did not realize that throwing stones from a 150 feet above the target significantly improves the velocity. The stones hit like bullets near my head! I stormed up the cliff and scared the crap out of them. They apologized and sped off on small bikes. Later, I saw them in town, where they cheerfully said, “hello” and politely introduced themselves. (The boys in the photograph above where not involved in the BB gun or rock throwing incidents. They are just nice friendly kids who let me take their picture.)

During the weekday, downtown is noisy with four wheelers outside the post office.

And the store, where I bought a sweet potato for $8.00.

But after the store closes, downtown is very quiet.

Very quiet.

But there are a few diversions, like the remains of the Hudson Bay Company, “Old Blubber Station”, where whales were rendered for oil at the turn of the 20th century.

Or watching the large tides rise and fall twice a day.

And seeing the harbor turn into the beach.

It’s also fun to watch the Sea Lift, which visits only once a year, unload food, gas, plywood, sinks, cars, carpets and clothes.

But the best thing to see on a walk through Pangnirtung is the view from the north end of town, where the mountains suggest an enormous circle like the sun balanced on the horizon just about to set.

38° and Foggy for 48

mGlier — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 14:33:00 +0000

For two days the temperature and the sky dropped in Pangnirtung. At first the fog sat on the ground, thick and full of drizzle. Then it lifted a hundred feet and made a line along the mountainsides like the edge of a square-dancer’s skirt. Later, the wind picked up and the fog began to swallow hillsides whole. During the swallowing phase, I went out to paint and settled on a rocky outcropping, near a small stream half way up the hills, high enough to stay within the fog. A rock, elaborately dressed in gray lichens, brown fungus and a large ruff of flowers and moss, was the subject for the day. Nearby the recent moisture helped to bring along new blooms including drifts of fantastic pink and cream spires. Transported by the moment, I suddenly realized that the fog which obscured the hillsides to such romantic effect, could also hide a polar bear. I shouldn’t be too worried about polar bears, since they tend to stay near the coast, but Canadian Wildlife TV and a book I am reading about surviving Greenland in 1900 have brought them to life in my mind. Suddenly the Fog was less pretty, and I planned emergency responses to polar bear attack. First, I would offer my sandwich to the bear, and hope that the zip lock bag would cause confusion and delay the attack so that I could roll into a ball as recommended, or run. During an attack I thought it unlikely that I would roll into a ball, even though it is recommended, so I decided to grab the pot of paint thinner to use as a weapon as I dashed away, tossing it toward the face of the bear during the chase over the tundra. Reassured by the effectiveness of the pot of paint thinner as a weapon, I went back to work. Sure enough, I was attacked later that day, but by mosquitoes, who are attracted to the colors of paint and die in quantity on the palette and the pictures. Since they struggle and muck up the paintings, I remove them with tweezers. Worries of bear attacks aside, I’m still the predator at the top of the food chain.
Late that night, the fog was sent off by clear weather and lots of wind.

On the Land

mGlier — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 01:34:00 +0000

In the morning after a sandwich, a chocolate bar, bug spray and 45 pounds of painting gear are packed, I walk up the river gorge behind Pangnirtung looking for something to paint. A shelf of ice, the fold of hills, a cascade of boulders, a gush of water, the color of lichens and the carpet of plants have all stopped me in my tracks. Usually the thing of interest is off the trail and I carefully climb up or down the sides of the gorge, adjusting to a new center of gravity as the backpack shifts. Once arrived, I look for a flat spot with a duo of rocks to serve as chair and table on which I happily drop the pack. Preparing to paint outside takes countless small actions, which were time consuming until they became routine. Wind, uneven land and broken equipment have created challenges to setting up, but bungee cords have proven to be an all-purpose solution. Filling the emptied back pack with rocks and suspending it from the bottom of the easel with a bungee, for example, is a good way to prevent the constant wind from upending everything. Setting up takes half an hour, which gives the mosquitoes time to smell blood and track me. They are very large and travel in packs, but so far, they have been deterred by applying a 50% solution of DEET to exposed skin every 4 hours.

The sky varies from “mostly cloudy” to “partly sunny”, so the light is most often soft and cool. As the weather has warmed to 50° F, the color of the distant hillsides has made a modest shift from tan to olive. Not all the colors, however, are quiet. The ice sheets, for example, are a brilliant aqua when suffused with daylight and the granite boulders which cover the landscape like nuts on a sundae are modeled with contrasting spots of orange, chartreuse and charcoal. More dramatically, the color of Pangnirtung Fiord shifts from black to teal as the light changes during the day. Like the desert and the prairie, the arctic landscape has no middle scale. Things are either enormous like the mountains, or miniaturized like the plants. Only the occasional boulder is of a middle size, and as a result, the experience of seeing is pushed to extremes. On the land I am either standing in a humbling panorama, or down on hand and knee studying the complexity of the ground cover. The openness of the land is both awesome and unsettling; on Baffin Island a human-scale rock can feel like reassuring companionship. The shape of the rocks has become a favorite motif for painting, as has falling water, ice, moss and lichens.

Virgin Mary Land

mGlier — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 21:40:00 +0000

I was out on the tundra painting, and marveling at the surface of the land, when a young Inuit man, wearing baggy fatigues and a patterned ‘hoody” appeared behind me and said, “Pangnirtung is Virgin Mary Land”. I jumped. Whether he was reporting a private vision or providing the English translation of Pangnirtung, I never learned. Virgin Mary Land, however, seems an apt description for the miraculous and tender cloak that blooms here.

Arctic Pancakes

mGlier — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 18:29:00 +0000

There is not a metal spatula to be bought in Pangnirtung, which is a problem since I like pancakes. So I am using a rubber spatula, which is inadequate because it is straight, narrow and flexible in order to scrape batter from concavities. A metal spatula, the kind I am missing, is hard and flat with a sharp leading edge. The correct spatula also has a bend so that the handle is parallel to the slope of the pan side, while the blade remains parallel to the pancake. This angle, I have discovered, is essential for the safe transport of wet loads.
When using a rubber spatula, the pancake must be carefully structured. First, make small cakes. Second, cook the pancake on low heat until it bubbles, and continue cooking until the bubbles begin to dry, and the bottom is crisp and rigid. Normally, one would not cook a side of a pancake to this degree, but a pancake that is moist in the center will gather into pleats when the rubber spatula is slid beneath. Of course, adding fruit is a concern, since it weakens the cake. With a fork, nudge the fruit-filled cake onto the rubber spatula, pause for balance, lift five inches, and flip decisively.

Although the Arctic is generally well stocked, the mainstream of commodities is far away and the connections to it are tenuous. But Scarcity in the form of a missing metal spatula has shown itself, and it is enough to trigger cunning.

House 524

mGlier — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 16:25:00 +0000

Like convicts, the houses in Pangnirtung have numbers. Addresses are not necessary since the streets are unmarked. House 524 is in uptown Pangnirtung, which is separated from downtown Pangnirtung by the landing strip. The house is very near the main road that runs along the fiord and not far from the edge of town, which makes it a good base for hikes into the countryside. Like all of the others, House 524 is built on pilings and sits several feet up in the air. It is strapped to the ground with steel cables to prevent the Arctic wind, which is compressed and excited by the steep walls of Pangnirtung Fiord, from carrying it off to Kansas. I awoke one night from the roar and bang of the gale outside. Things were flying in the night and hitting the house. For hours the bed shook, and I imagined the house flipping and myself landing under the bed, with an impression of the popcorn ceiling on my face.

The house is very comfortable, recently renovated and minimally furnished. The water is delivered by truck every two days, and the sewage is pumped and the garbage is removed on a similar schedule. Electricity is made by an oil-fired generator in town. The garbage is hauled a mile away, and burned, poorly, every other day, sending up brown smoke which rises a few hundred feet before it is stopped by a thermal barrier and spread laterally over the town. The noise, odors and dust created by these activities keep the fundamental responsibilities of the municipality in plain sight.

The views from House 524 are striking. From the bedroom I can see Pangnirtung Fiord and the entrance to Auyuittuc National Park. It’s a treat to watch the weather and the light move over the mountains. At the moment, the sun makes a continuous ellipse overhead, dipping to, but not under, the horizon. If the top of the world were a bald head, the course of the sun would describe the brim of a hat set at an angle. By 3 AM the morning sun rises high enough to flood the bedroom window with morning light, confounding my internal clock. From the living room I can see the “golf course”. Dozens of kids play late into the night batting balls over the rocky lot. No landscape is more inhospitable to golf than this, but the kids are persistent. From the kitchen I can see the street and my neighbor’s yard. Last week the oil truck delivered a load, but my neighbor was in the process of installing a new oil tank and had unhooked the old one. As a result, six hundred liters of fuel oil spilled into the space between our houses. This is the third oil spill this year in Pangnirtung. Thousands of liters of aviation fuel went directly into the bay because of a valve that was left open. Another large spill was contained by a retaining wall before making it to sea. Pangnirtung is entirely dependent on oil. Heat and power are from oil. Everything, including food, clothing, building materials, and medical supplies, comes by plane or sea lift. Local forms of transportation, trucks, four wheelers and boats all use oil. The remoteness and harshness of the Arctic exposes dependency. An oil shortage would end this settlement very quickly.

With the help of cardboard, plastic and tape, the master suite of House 524 has become a studio, a little dim, but functional. The challenge of establishing living and working spaces has inspired practical ingenuity, an enjoyable frame of mind

Night Walking in Pangnirtung

mGlier — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 18:05:00 +0000

During the first week in Pangnirtung, my daughter, Lili, and I walked each night in the endless light of the Arctic summer. Photo credit for “Night Walking in Pangnirtung”: Lili Holzer-Glier

First Stop, Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada

mGlier — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 12:38:00 +0000

Iqaluit can best be described as adolescent. It is energetic but without a plan and cocky and desperate all at once. The guests of the B and B include a Parisian businesswoman, an English architect and a financial consultant from Ireland, who is providing a “strategic growth plan” for a wealthy Inuit family. The Pub is patrolled by a task force of bouncers dressed in black shirts with “Security” printed on the chest. The town is growing quickly and the suburban model of living has reached the Arctic. Dirt “avenues” extend from the airport to homes arranged on dead-end “courts” and “lanes” spread out over bare rock and tundra. Since much of the shallow top soil has been blown away by construction, there is no yard culture in Arctic suburbia. Commercial shipping containers serve as practical replacements for garages and garden sheds. Litter is everywhere. The constant wind picks up everything that is not anchored and spreads plastic wrappers and aluminum siding across the town and tundra.

When I ignore the garbage, the land is remarkable. It’s in the high 30′s, the sea ice is still in Frobisher Bay, but much of the land is exposed. Pools of spring rain have collected on top of the sea ice and reflect aqua light which is weirdly like the blue of a shallow Caribbean sea. The plant life hugs the rugged topography, forming an extravagantly plush carpet underfoot. Bleak and brown at a distance, the vegetation is richly textured and subtly colored; sea green lichens, flowering purple saxifrage, tiny blue berries, white heath, red ground cover and asphalt-black patches of organic matter drowned and burned by water and wind are spread across thousands of miles. The familiar fuzzy catkins of the pussy willow are blooming , but unlike the southern version which reaches up and out, the Arctic Willow submits to the wind and shapes itself to the curves of rock. Sometimes deference is a good choice!

Photo credit for “First Stop, Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada” : Lili Holzer-Glier