The (Late) Morning Star

morning star

It was a bit weird getting used to the very short days up near the Arctic Circle and waking up, breakfasted and out into our tour bus for a comfortable 9am start meant that we were stumbling around in pitch darkness. But it gave us a chance to see the sunrise every morning over the extraordinary volcanic Icelandic landscape. Although the nights were too cloudy with snow for us to see the Aurora Borealis, we seemed to have some fairly clear dawns and were lucky to see the moon (almost full) with Jupiter earlier in the morning and then a bit later, Venus and Saturn shining brightly over the mountain tops. Here’s the Morning Star above the heavy mountains with the slightest streak of an orangey dawn just starting to peep over the horizon. I prepared a Khadi sketchbook with a grey ink wash, applied randomly with a sponge and drew over this with compressed charcoal, chalky oil pastel and white conte crayon.

power station

We saw a lot of power stations, hydro-electric and geothermal, making good use of natural resources. They were generally quite pretty, lit up with coloured lights, contrasting with the black, barren landscape. The geothermal ones were on the volcanic bits of the island, which smelled faintly sulphurous.

Hot And Cold In Iceland

 

geysir 1

Iceland is full of geological wonders. In the freezing weather of late November, we welcomed a stop to explore geysirs and hot springs. The original Geysir, the origin of the name for all similar phenomenon, no longer blows, but a few yards away Strokkur blasts away every few minutes. The landscape is ethereally misty and lovely and warm. Earlier in the day we visited the massive waterfull, Gullfoss in appalling, freezing conditions. I tried to draw, but it was snowing heavily and I only managed about 30 seconds.

gullfoss

I scribbled a very brief impression, but the weather was too brutal to carry on. Here are some of Husb’s photos of the waterfall. It’s massive.

gullfoss 1

gullfoss 2

 

East Meets West In The North

thingvellir

Iceland is a lump of lava up by the North Pole. The reason it’s there is because volcanoes keep erupting in the area because the North American tectonic plate and the Eurasian tectonic plate are pulling apart from each other. And this keeps setting off volcanoes. As the plates rip apart from each other, a large bit of land in the middle is gradually falling down between them, forming a rift valley. It was one of the places we visited and it is the site of the ancient Viking parliament, Thingvellir. It’s an extraordinary place; one minute you’re standing on the Westernmost point of Europe and a short drive later, you clamber out on the Easternmost point of North America. Awesome. I made this drawing of an unusual rock formation in the high cliffs on the American side. I used a small piece of mounting board, pre-prepared with a grey wash and drew in compressed charcoal, white conte crayon and soft oil pastel.

drowning pool                                       church

Not far away was this frozen pond, in the top photo, which is called ‘The Drowning Pool’. It was used in times past to execute women by drowning. The trees were too small for hanging and men were executed by beheading. Grim. Underneath it is a photo facing south along the rift valley, taking in a typical country church.

the rift

On the left, North America. On the right, Eurasia, a rift valley in between.

Floyd On Ice

on the road

Travelling across Iceland with Olafur The Guide, Otto The Driver and a gaggle of, mostly, babyboomers, we went off-road in some giant jeeps up to the Gigjokull glacier. We’d had three days of deep snow, which was spectacular but unfortunately it meant that we weren’t able to see any Aurorae because of the heavy cloud cover. We set off in darkness and a blizzard (it’s so far north that sun didn’t rise until about 10am) and headed for a rendevous with our intrepid drivers, who said very seriously that the snowstorms had made conditions on the glacier treacherous and that some jeeps had been having difficulties getting into the wilderness. Then they grinned broadly with a gung-ho, bring-it-on spirit and we loaded ourselves into the jeeps and off we went on an adventure.

Truck

Look what Husb found!

The conditions were certainly the roughest I’ve experienced, and I’ve been up the Karakoram Highway! But hell, what fun! There were no roads and only the occasional track sketched very faintly in the deep snow. The landscape changes all the time; rivers alter their courses; the riverbanks can collapse without warning; all good stuff. The guys we were with knew what they were doing; they’ve been going into the wilderness since they were kids and they loved it.

Blue ice 1

The landscape is so amazing; my feeble sketch doesn’t begin to do it justice (mind you, my fingers nearly froze off after about 30 seconds, so I’m not going to beat myself up over it). On the journey back to the road, we hit a very steep river gully and there were a sticky few minutes when the jeep really struggled to pull itself out of the river and up the other side. As it strained its way up the riverbank through feet of snow, the driver cranked up the volume on the hifi and Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon blared out to the cheers of the jeepload of babyboomers. Surreal and spectacular. When I first heard that album, almost 4 decades ago, I never dreamt that I’d ever hear it in circumstances like this. If I’d died at that moment, I’d have died happy :D.

blue ice 2

Scribbling On A Glacier

geysir small

ICELANDIC JOKE (courtesy of Olafur The Guide)

Q. “What do you do if you’re lost in an Icelandic forest?”

A. “Stand up.”

I guess you had to be there.

There are lots of  forests in Iceland made up of the Arctic Birch, Betula pubescens tortuosa, but because of the climate the trees are generally very short, slight and contorted. Hence the joke :). The reddish brown colour of the bare trees combined with the orangy yellow of the grasses splashed colour across the monochrome winter landscape. I scribbled the sketch in a couple of minutes (it was soooo cold) using compressed charcoal, white conte crayon and soft oil pastel onto a small piece of pink mountboard randomly prepared with a grey wash of dilute Indian ink.

Glacial pool

We travelled off-road in giant jeeps to the Gigjokull glacier where I took these photos. Despite the altitude and freezing conditions there were plenty of Arctic Birch around.

Glacial trees 2

The day was dry and clear but brutally cold and the snow very thick. Our guides showed us how to walk on deep snow without sinking (you stamp on it) but once I didn’t stamp hard enough and sank up to my thigh! We were many miles into the wilderness but saw a lonely hunter searching for ptarmigan, which is a Xmas delicacy in Iceland. It can only be hunted for personal consumption, not for sale. We didn’t get to taste any ptarmigan, but we ate smoked puffin and wild greylag goose. Very tasty.

Stacks And Giants

basalt

We spent a while on a wonderful beach of black sand covered with shiny dark, coin-shaped pebbles, fringed with towering silvery basalt columns, like the ones at the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland. I couldn’t resist scribbling and despite the snow, sketched some of the basalt with one of the Reynisdrangur sea stacks in the background. Husb snapped me from above. It was freezing. I managed about 3 minutes with my gloves off.

basalt stack

This is drawn into a Khadi hand-made paper sketchpad, 20cms square, previously prepared with a sepia wash sponged on randomly. It is drawn with a Faber Castell Pitt drawing pen, size S, and graphite block. By the way, my luggage was searched at Heathrow and my bag caused a stir because the chemical sniffing machine detected graphite and that’s one of their banned substance. They made a bit of a fuss until I told them that I’m an artist and carry blocks of graphite for drawing. They could’ve asked…….

stack cave

Husb photographed the sea stacks from a large cave eroded into the basalt cliffs.

Freezing Mitts And Yellow Grass

yellow grass

As we travelled around Iceland, Husb and I noticed that the grass that thinly covers the black lava landscape is an unusual yellowy-orange colour. I think it might be Leymus Arenarius (Lyme grass) but I’m not sure. Before I went, I prepared different drawing media, including a 20cm square sketchbook of handmade Khadi paper. I randomly coated the pages with either a thin grey wash made from Indian ink or one from sepia. This is scribbled onto one of the grey washes using compressed charcoal, chalky pastels and white oil bar. I sketched this quickly from the moving bus – it was about 9.30 am and the sun was only just coming up over the lava mountains, turning the grass quite a vivid rusty orange.

Here’s a photo Husb took of the grass on the black beach at Vik.

yellow grass

And one of me, freezing my mitts off, drawing the trolls in between snow showers.

freezing mitts

Frozen Trolls And Black Sand

 

Now that I’ve had a bit of sleep, I’ve been looking through the drawings I did in Iceland. I prefer to draw when I’m travelling because the memories are more vivid than when I’ve just taken photos. Olaf  The Guide and Otto The Driver (on a sabbatical from Springfield, obviously) took us to a lovely little town, Vik on the South coast.  As Iceland is basically a great big load of volcanoes, the sand is pounded lava and it’s black. It’s beautiful. So dramatic. Off the coast is a stack formation known as the Trolls. Legend has it that two trolls were trying to tug a ship back to their cave when the sun rose. As everyone knows, sunlight turns trolls to stone. So there they stand, frozen forever.

I prepared a selection of drawing materials before I went because I didn’t know what the climate was going to be like. Here’s a piece of A4 hand-made paper that I bought from the Tate gallery. I coated it with two layers of acrylic gesso and taped a piece of acid-free tissue over it, so that it wouldn’t smudge during the journey. I did the drawing (very quickly – it was freezing) in black and white oil bars but I wasn’t particularly happy with it so I smoothed the tissue over and left it in my bag. When I looked at it later, the tissue had stuck and it looked much better. So I left it on and redrew the outlines with compressed charcoal.The sea is actually paler than the velvety black sand.

Here’s a photo of the black beach and the Trolls taken by Husb.

 

Volcanos, Glaciers and Freezing Fingers

 

I’ve been to Iceland! That’s the country, not the shop! It was amazing. I took sketchbooks, paper and card with me and loads of different drawing materials because I wasn’t sure what would work in that climate – my fingers as it turned out. It was freezing – 3 days of torrential snow taught me the meaning of suffering for my art. I whipped my fleecy gloves off every chance I got but even with my miser mittens on underneath, I couldn’t manage to draw outside in that climate for more than about 3 minutes. Then I cried a bit as my poor, raw, red fingers warmed up painfully.

But you’ll have to wait for my sketches and photos of Iceland because first of all I had to endure the journey. Five hours of torture by bus to the airport, fighting travel sickness all the way, then trial by boredom at Heathrow, waiting around for hours because you never know if the security queues are going to be huge (they weren’t). So I did a couple of scribbles of fellow queuers. I noticed different sorts of people queueing for different countries. The people in the posh clothes, high heels, immaculate hair, nails and co-ordinated luggage were on their way to New York, Barcelona and Paris. The people waiting for the Iceland flight were mostly rugged outdoor types, like the one above, dressed in sensible hiking gear and sturdy boots, carrying rucksacks and flashing emergency supplies of Kendal’s Mint Cake. My sort of people.

I took a different angle on this one. I started drawing the Kindle reader, but got bored and drew Husb’s severely foreshortened arms instead. He’s got hairy ones. We had a good flight – it was quick, only about two and a half hours and came into Keflavik airport just as the sun was setting over the most extraordinary volcanic landscape; dark solidified lava jutting into a dark sea splashed with the red of a bloody sunset. Marvellous.

Anyway, over the next few days I’m going to blog my sketches, warts and all, and some photos to show you what it was really like. But now I’m getting an early night because we didn’t get back until two o’clock this morning and I need some zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz’s 🙂

I’m No Twitcher

 

Just a quickie as I was walking past a lampost this morning and I saw this crow thingy on top. He wanted to fly down and eat some discarded food on the road but I was too close. He made his views known by making squawking noises at me and moving his body and head up and down. I’m no twitcher so I don’t know what sort of crow thingy it was. Just managed a few scribbles before he flew off in disgust.
I’ll be offline for a few days but when I come back I hope to have some new work to show. See you next week. 🙂