VERY LARGE ICEBERG PAINTED BY ROCKWELL KENT

ROCKWELL KENT (1882-1971)
Very Large Iceberg (180m-590ft) Greenland / Danemark
In "Grayday, Green land Iceberg", oil on canvas.

The painter
Rockwell Kent, artist, author, and political activist, had a long and varied career. During his lifetime, he worked as an architectural draftsman, illustrator, printmaker, painter, lobsterman, ship's carpenter, and dairy farmer. Born in Tarrytown Heights, New York, he lived in Maine, Newfoundland, Alaska, Greenland, and the Adirondacks and explored the waters around Tierra del Fuego in a small boat. Kent's paintings, lithographs, and woodcuts often portrayed the bleak and rugged aspects of nature; a reflection of his life in harsh climates.His experience as a carpenter and builder and his familiarity with tools served him well when he took up the graphic process. His blocks were marvels of beautiful cutting, every line deliberate and under perfect control. The tones and lines in his lithography were solidly built up, subtle, and full of color. He usually made preliminary studies- old-mater style- for composition or detail before starting on a print. Nothing was vague or accidental about his work; his expression was clear and deliberate. Neither misty tonalities nor suggestiveness were to his taste. He was a highly objectified art - clean, athletic, sometimes almost austere and cold. He either recorded adventures concretely, or dealt in ideas. His studio was a model of the efficient workshop: neat, orderly, with everything in its place. His handwriting, the fruit of his architectural training, was beautiful and precise.
Among the many notes of increasing awareness of Kent's contributions to American culture is the reproduction of one of Kent's pen-and-ink drawings from Moby Dick on a U.S. postage stamp, part of the 2001 commemorative panel celebrating such American illustrators as Maxfield Parrish, Frederic Remington, and Norman Rockwell.

The Iceberg
An iceberg is a piece of freshwater ice more than 15 m long that has broken off a glacier or an ice shelf and is floating freely in open (salt) water.  Smaller chunks of floating glacially-derived ice are called "growlers" or "bergy bits".  Both are generally spawned from disintegrating icebergs.[ Iceberg size classes, as established by the International Ice Patrol, are summarized in Table 1. The 1912 loss of the RMS Titanic led to the formation of the International Ice Patrol in 1914. Much of an iceberg is below the surface, which led to the expression "tip of the iceberg" to illustrate a small part of a larger unseen issue. Icebergs are considered a serious maritime hazard.  Icebergs vary considerably in size and shape. Icebergs that calve from glaciers in Greenland, are often irregularly shaped while Antarctic ice shelves often produce large tabular (table top) icebergs. The largest iceberg currently floating in the ocean, named A-76, calved from the Ronne Ice Shelf into the Weddell Sea in Antarctica measuring 4320 km2.  The largest iceberg in recent history, named B-15, measured nearly 300 km x 40 km. The B-15 iceberg calved from the Ross Ice Shelf in January 2000.  The largest iceberg on record was an Antarctic tabular iceberg of over 31,000 square kilometres (12,000 sq mi) [335 by 97 kilometres (208 by 60 mi)] sighted 240 kilometres (150 mi) west of Scott Island, in the South Pacific Ocean, by the USS Glacier on November 12, 1956. This iceberg was larger than Belgium. Big icebergs are also often compared in size to the area of Manhattan The largest icebergs recorded have been calved, or broken off, from the Ross Ice Shelf of Antarctica. Icebergs may reach a height of more than 100 metres (300 ft) above the sea surface, and have mass ranging from about 100,000 tonnes up to more than 10 million tonnes. Icebergs or pieces of floating ice smaller than 5 meters above the sea surface are classified as "bergy bits"; smaller than 1 meter—"growlers". The largest known iceberg in the North Atlantic was 168 metres (551 ft) above sea level, reported by the USCG icebreaker Eastwind in 1958, making it the height of a 55-story building. These icebergs originate from the glaciers of western Greenland and may have interior temperatures of −15 to −20 °C (5 to −4 °F).

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2022 - Wandering Vertexes...
by Francis Rousseau