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This observation will stay between me and her. Her the White-backed Woodpecker in front me or her the forest I kneeled in to draw? Both. Both rare, both disappearing, threatened, and hidden from the world. Their inaccessibility and their remoteness have so far saved them, along with our ignorance. A state of things ever more
“Watch out! don’t step on it!” Yes, it is indeed one of these places where you have to make sure not to step on a puppy Fur seal. A place, where you have to make sure its mum doesn’t come and bite your fingers off. Where you have to watch your back for the males
Five minutes before I loose sight of the coveFive minutes before the clouds engulf the mountainsFive minutes before the ship turns and distorts the perspectiveFive minutes before we are blinded by the fog.Five minutes before all disappears behind this rocks. Five minutes to encapsulate a world.Five minutes to fix a future memory.Five minutes to aggregate
It should have been water. It was ice.We should have been just entering. We struggled our way in.Floes put on our track as a way to slow down. Everybody onboard slowed down.Away the excitement of the ever more, bigger, closer.You’re just caught by the landscape.And as you navigate the sea ice, you navigate your thoughts.The
I saw it with the naked eye standing out on a ridge. A few trees hide me, a light wind in my favor that carries my scent far away. I advance slowly, cautiously thanks to this Mountain Hare that I came across half an hour before. It was in this forest of birches with an
I left to explore plateaus that are a few hours’ drive from home, with the secret hope of finding reindeer there. No need to keep the suspense going, I didn’t see them. On the other hand, I found subtle hints of the Arctic there. A feeling that is barely felt but whose difference is surprisingly
I look away from my paintings, from my exhibition. My eyes roam the room and glance over the stuffed animals of the “Vår Natur” (“Our Nature”) exhibition at the Natural History Museum of Stavanger. Among them, a wolf. But unlike the other animals here, this one doesn’t stand proudly. The taxidermists have not rendered the
Peregrine falcon in the distance in the heat haze. As is often the case in this kind of situation, I draw too big. It is small, too small, in the eyepiece of my spotting scope. However, I paint it large on my sheet of thirty by forty centimeters. The usual consequence is that I get
« As soon as you see something,you already start to intellectualize it.As soon as you intellectualize something,it is no longer what you saw. » Shunryu SuzukiSeptember 8, 1967 As enigmatic and obscure this quote may seem, it is a very powerful description of the main predicament the drawer-from-observation is facing. He wants to paint his
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