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BEYOND WORDS

Artist Noel Miller describes the role that art has played in communicating the romance and fragility of Antarctica.

When visitors get back from a trip to Antarctica friends inevitably ask: 'How was it?' And, almost without exception, they find that the vocabulary they have at their disposal is inadequate to describe it.   

In the end, they suggest that the only way to convey their feelings it is to tell you to go there yourself. The overwhelming vastness, the ethereal beauty, the underlying spirituality; words cannot describe the way Antarctica affects us all.

Artists, photographers and writers play a major role in helping to describe 'The Ice', as it is referred to lovingly by many visitors. They convey a visual record that acquaints us with the southern land and the spiritual and emotional feelings the landscape evokes. They remind us of the fragility of an environment where a one- and-a-half-degree increase in temperature can have a devastating effect. For many centuries, artists and writers have played a part in letting the majority of the world know the Antarctic and their role has become increasingly important in relaying a conservation message about this beautiful and fragile continent.

A common element to works of art portraying Antarctica is a fascination for things vast, unknown and elemental: an environment that can at the same time be beautiful and hostile. Human expeditions into it have long been the subject of paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures. These works have enough characteristics in common to become known as Antarctic Art.

Antarctic Art can be said to have its beginnings in the decorative work of ancient and medieval map makers and illuminators. Their sometimes grotesque imaginings about a fabled South Land provided a fertile, if insubstantial, basis for later representations which followed the Chinese discovery of southern lands late in the thirteenth century.

Until the 1760s, maps (some of which are brightly illuminated) are the only known visual proof of the continent until the explorer Captain James Cook visited in 1773.  Cook's crew included the artist William Hodges who made many sketches that he later turned into etchings. The first known oil painting of Antarctic icebergs, The Ice Islands, is attributed to Hodges.

Other adventurers followed. James Weddell's voyage of 1822-23 resulted in his book, A Voyage to the South Pole. Etchings such as A Sea Leopard from the Orkneys are thought to have been drawn from skins and memory, which may account for the inaccurate proportions of this and many naturalist drawings of the times. D'Urville's 1838 voyage to Antarctica was detailed in Voyage du Pole Sud, which is believed to include some of the finest scientific illustrations ever created. These early publications provided quite amazing information to a world fascinated by the new southern continent.
 
Expeditions around the turn of the twentieth century, which culminated in a race to the pole by Amundsen and Scott, brought a significant change in the direction of Antarctic Art. Prominent among the artists of the time was Dr Edward Wilson, surgeon, artist and zoologist. Wilson joined Scott and Shackleton in a journey in 1902-03 to get as far south as possible. Bad weather, sick and dying sledge dogs and scurvy turned them back. He joined Scott's expedition again in 1909. In mid- winter and darkness, Wilson, with two other members of the team, man-hauled to Cape Crozier in continuous darkness in temperatures as low as  minus 61 degrees Celsius, to collect Emperor Penguin eggs for Wilson's embryological studies. The conditions meant they were virtually blind as they crawled over pressure ridges and crevasses back to Cape Evans. Wilson was one of the party of five to reach the Pole on 17 January 1912, only to find the tent left by Amundsen. He died with the rest of the team on the return journey, 47 kilometres short of their camp.

The selection of Edward Wilson for Scott's last expedition exemplifies the traditional importance of  the artist-illustrator in exploration. Wilson left a legacy of fine paintings, naturalist drawings and etchings and poems, including the iconic Sledge Hauling on Skis and Icebergs of 1911.

This was also the dawn of a new medium for recording remote landscape and delivering it to the masses all over the world. The invention of the camera in the mid- nineteenth century led to a peak of photographic achievement in the 'Heroic Era' of the early twentieth century. Scott also took Herbert Ponting on his expedition, a photographer who seized a unique opportunity to show what could be done by a master of the medium.

About the same time, Mawson took on Australian photographer Frank Hurley, who also accompanied Shackleton on his fateful voyage. Hurley's photographs of the Home of the Blizzard camp at Cape Denison and of Shackleton's ship Endurance trapped in the ice of the Weddell Sea are amongst the most enduring of all Antarctic images. Ponting and Hurley established photography as an Antarctic Art form and for the next forty years the camera was used by professionals and amateurs to capture the increasing human presence on the continent. The most significant body of Antarctic artwork was produced by two American artists, Backus and Haun, official navy artists for the beginnings of Operation Deep Freeze when the US base was moved to its present site of McMurdro on Ross Island in the mid 1950s.

Since the 1950s, artists, writers and composers have visited the Antarctic in ever- increasing numbers. This is due mainly to the artist and writer programmes set up by the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and the equivalent bodies in the USA, Australia and New Zealand. More than 200 artists have been to Antarctica since 1990. New Zealand and Australia have had a programme operating since the early 1990s and the USA has been sending artists since 1955. The BAS programme for artists and writers was established in 2002-03.

For artists painting on the great southern continent, the urge to return is as overwhelming as the vastness of the scenery they paint. They describe with passion how the place enters their souls and takes on a spiritual meaning for them. They describe their obsession with the ice.  For all these artists the task is to interpret their love of the landscape so that the rest of the world can share their passion.

They also discuss at length what for them is different about interpreting Antarctica.  The first of these is the light which is at once internal and external. It is all-encompassing, but seems to glow from within the icebergs and the snow covered mountains and is reflected in every direction. 

A writer on the US Programme (National Science Foundation), Stephen Pyne described it this way:

The ice acts in peculiar ways on scenes and consciousness.  It is at once a sink, a reducer, and a mirror.  In small doses, it accents.  By removing clutter it can even amplify a scene's message.

The expectation of many visitors (shared by many artists) is that what they are viewing is blue sky and white snow, that the palette is limited. However, with time the eye is no longer deceived and the viewer is aware of a myriad of unexpected colours in the landscape. Nothing can prepare the viewer for the colours of the sunsets. At the same time, artists mention their difficulty in working with a palette that does not include colours with which they are used to working. For example, Australian landscape painters no longer have vivid yellows and oranges in the landforms.

Another peculiarity is the absence of reference points in the landscape. There are no trees and plants (or buildings for the most part) to provide scale. The immensity of what is there deceives the brain. This is complicated by the fact that there is rarely the single horizon to which we are accustomed. The viewer can often detect up to three horizon lines.

For her Masters Studies, Lynne Andrews, from the University of Tasmania, covered the subject of Antarctic art.  In her thesis she wrote:

Scale and distance are deceptive in this white land often blurred by blizzards, but also suffused by rich unexpected colours. The senses are stimulated by its sights - sculpted bergs, fluted ice cliffs,  seas of pancake ice; its sounds - howling wind, treacherous crackling and crunching ice, squawking, screeching or porpoising penguins; its smells - the pungent aroma of sub-Antarctic plants. All inspire creative responses from visual artists, writers and composers in a domain that has been largely that of the scientist.

But of all the factors for artists, photographers and everyone else visiting the Antarctic, the prominent one is the inadequacy of language. This factor alone increases the importance of sending artists to the Antarctic to spread visually the message that is so difficult to express verbally.

Kym Stanley Robinson explains the problem of finding adequate language in his 1997 novel Antarctica, written after his visit to Antarctica on the USA programme:

Look then at this ocean I am camped on at this moment. A white immensity; nothing to say about it. Erebus stands in the air like a powerful deity. Before you can read a landscape it has to become a part of your inmost heart. When I came to Antarctica as a proud young man, I saw the land and it baffled me, and I could not paint it in my poems. Nothing came to me. 

Only later as I dreamed of it, did I grow to love it.  What words I could find were the oldest words in their simplest combinations.

Blue sky, white snow

That is all language can say of this place

All else is footnotes and the human stories.

NOEL MILLER, ARTIST

In December 2003, Australian artist Noel Miller accompanied his partner on a cruise  to the Antarctic Peninsula.  His partner, a specialist in the biology of the Antarctic, is a veteran of many research trips, principally to Scott Base on Ross Island.  He was an inaugural member of a team of lecturers with specialist science backgrounds on the ship MV Discovery spending its first season in the Southern Ocean.

So began for Miller what he describes as a love affair with icebergs and penguins.

'I had to return the next year and I needed an area of expertise to join the expedition team lecturing to passengers. I had in the intervening time read a lot about Antarctic Art and the Artist and Writer Programmes run by Australia, New Zealand and the USA, so that became my area, adding a humanities side to the scientific team.'

Miller's lecture has led many passengers, by their own admission, to see the scenery in a completely different way.  He shows the work of artists and photographers since early times and describes how they have been inspired by the unique and fragile land.

Miller quit his job as a health lobbyist in 2002 to become a full-time artist.  He has since then been a finalist in many national competitions and is well known for his Australian landscapes.  He spends several months each year painting the Australian outback, using found ochres and natural pigments. 

He also paints a series of works each year based on his Antarctic trips and produces woodcuts of penguins that are popular on-board ship.

Miller's website is www.noelmiller.com

Stones

By Pablo Neruda

There everything ends
and nothing;
There everything begins:
the rivers say farewell in the ice,
the sky has married the snow,
there are neither highways nor horses
and the only building was raised by the stone.
No one inhabits the castle,
not even lost souls,
those whom the cold and the cold wind
have terrified: there
the solitude of the world is lonely,
and for this the stone
became music, it lifted itself
to or to sing
yet it was silent.
Only the wind, that whips whistling from the pole,
Only the empty white
And a murmur of the rainbirds
over the castle of solitude.