Prussian blue waters, ice pillows, frozen
earth, and an omnipresent moon. I have just returned
from an expedition to the High Arctic as part of my
plan to paint all of the oceans on the planet. Now I
only have one more to go, the Antarctic. I sailed to
the Arctic on a 3-masted tall ship with the Arctic
Circle, an expeditionary program that puts scientists
and artists together to explore the High Arctic. We
started in Longyearbyen, which is the northernmost
settlement on the planet, in the archipelago of
Svalbard, an international territory north of Norway.
From there we sailed to nearly 80 degrees north, just
below the permanent ice that covers the North Pole.
September/October is about the only time boats can
get that far north. The rest of the year the permanent
ice coming from the North Pole covers that part of the
Arctic Ocean so boats aren’t able to go any further.
One of my great passions is exploring the ‘line’
between abstraction and representation in visual art. I
turn representational subject matter (notably water)
into abstract, formal paintings. Now I am painting the
most abstract waterscape I have ever seen.
For my Arctic Ocean series I am faced with a
natural waterscape unlike anything I have witnessed
before. Normally, I deconstruct the physical forms
found in water to create stacks of abstracted rhythms.
In this case, the Arctic Ocean already looks abstract
before I’ve had a chance to deconstruct it. My work is
formal, abstract. I paint shapes and patterns inspired
by ripples and wavelets on the surface of water. For