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

CRIMSON CLIFFS GREENLAND BY CHARLES HAMILTON SMITH

CHARLES HAMILTON SMITH  (1776-1859) 

Crimson Cliffs (300 m- 984 ft) 

Danemark- Greenland

  In  Red Snow along cliffs in Greenland - Watercolour from  Views of Polar region, Yale Center for British arts- Connectitcut, USA

The Cliffs
Crimson Cliffs ( 300m) are a cape on the northwestern coast of Greenland, in northern Baffin Bay.Crimson Cliffs are located west of Cape York, an important geographical landmark that delimits the northwestern end of Melville Bay, with the other end commonly defined as Wilcox Head, the western promontory on Kiatassuaq Island.
Red snow or blood snow  also called or watermelon snow, pink snow or snow algae is a phenomenon caused by Chlamydomonas nivalis, a species of green algae containing a secondary red carotenoid pigment (astaxanthin) in addition to chlorophyll. Unlike most species of fresh-water algae, it is cryophilic (cold-loving) and thrives in freezing water.
This type of snow is common during the summer in alpine and coastal polar regions worldwide, such as the Sierra Nevada of California. Here, at altitudes of 10,000 to 12,000 feet (3,000–3,600 m), the temperature is cold throughout the year, and so the snow has lingered from winter storms. Compressing the snow by stepping on it or making snowballs leaves it looking red. Walking on watermelon snow often results in getting bright red soles and pinkish trouser cuffs.
 "By August first he had reached a point near the Petowik glacier which lies just northward of the "Crimson Cliffs" of Sir John Ross. This is so called from the fact that on the snow-clad cliffs and glacier surfaces at this point Sir John Ross, in 1818, discovered a red deposit which had fallen about and mixed with the snow, giving it a reddish color which was pretty widely distributed. What was it? For a long time this was a mystery, but it was at last proven to be of vegetable origin: now, the point--to be taken up in detail later is simply this: where could any vegetable matter, either a pollen from larger plants or a very humble sort of red mossy or spore like growth, come from? There is no other case in the whole realm of botany that would justify us in assuming that a plant can grow on ice-bergs or on snow. A plant requires certain elements and certain temperatures. Evidently, somewhere those factors must be in existence. Where, we shall see later."
Excerpt form "Three Years of Arctic Service", by General A. W. Greely, 1881

The artist
Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Hamilton Smith, was an English artist, naturalist, antiquary, illustrator, soldier, and... spy as well !. His military career began in 1787, when he studied at the Austrian academy for artillery and engineers at Mechelen and Leuven in Belgium (his native country). Although his military service, which ended in 1820 and included the Napoleonic Wars, saw him travel extensively (including the West Indies, Canada, United States, Southern and Northern Europe and ...Antarctica).
As a prolific self-taught illustrator (over 38,000 drawings!) He left quite an important number of books of beautifully watercolored landscapes taken all around the world. those nooks of watercolors are nowadays in the collections of the Yale Center From British Art. Among them :
- Views of France, Volume I (81 watercolors), Views of France, Volume II (93 watercolors),
- Views of England and Wales, Volume I (82 watercolors), Views of England and Wales, Volume II (74 watercolors),
- Views of Northern Europe, Volume I (68watercolors) , Views of Northern Europe, Volume II (78) watercolors),
- Views of Polar Regions (75 watercolors) (see above)
- Views of Spain, Volume I (69 watercolors), Views of Spain, Volume II (72 watercolors), But one of his noteworthy achievements was an 1800 experiment to determine which color should be used for military uniforms. He is also known in military history circles for Costume of the Army of the British Empire, produced towards the end of the Napoleonic Wars and an accurate depiction of contemporary British uniform.
As an antiquarian, he also produced, in collaboration with Samuel Rush Meyrick, Costume of the Original Inhabitants of the British Islands, 1815, and The Ancient Costume of England, with historical illustrations of medieval knights, ladies, shipsm and battles.
He also wrote on the history of the Seven Years' War and The Natural history of dogs.
Quite a productive fellow !

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2020 - Wandering Vertexes...
by Francis Rousseau