4-March Ross Sea Sculpture Garden

4-March Ross Sea Sculpture Garden

While slowly zig zagging through the broken pack ice barrier, I found the amazing shapes of the sculptured ice very inspiring. This scene on a bright Antarctic summers day with pancake ice between the broken and shaped pack ice, made me think of a white lily pond in a sculpture garden.

I have been painting nearly every evening whilst on this voyage and it is proving to be a truly inspiring experience, the light and colour experienced is thrilling. I was reminded of a thought I had before leaving New Zealand, when I was packing my paints to take with me. The thought , ‘Antarctica would be easy to paint - lots of negative space painting’ I thought ie ‘I would just paint around the edges of the ice and leave the iceberg itself as the white of the paper’, (watercolour painting doesn’t normally use white paint). BUT experience has proved to be everything but, the icebergs show off a kaleidoscope of colours depending on the time of day and how the sun hits it and is reflected, how shadows fall. The colours also depending on the density of the ice, what part of the glacier it originated from.