thinking about the North..

 

 

Sunday mood..

playing with water and

thinking about the North

 

Sunday sketch / a book

 

 

"How many days it takes is difficult to say. For here

there are no days because there are no nights. One day

melts into the next, and you cannot say this is the end

of today and now it is tomorrow and that was yesterday.

It is always light, the sea is always murmuring, and the

mist stands immovable as a wall around the hut.[…]

The way to the lagoon is like a journey into the incorporeal.

Mist above us and around us, and under our feet nothing

but stones. Large, broken, sharp-edged stones."

 

—Christiane Ritter, A Woman in the Polar Night

 

 

"We make our way along the famously beautiful coast,

until one day we notice that northward the world is growing

lighter and lighter, more bleak and more lonely. The nights

do not darken. Bare and craggy mountaintops jut out the livid

light of the water. A strange cool wind blows to me out of this

primeval landscape. It might be the world in the last days of

the Flood."

 

"When she tries to take a photograph, Ritter says,

"It seems to me a deadly sin to steal a piece of this

supernatural scene and carry it away with me."

[...]"A year in the Arctic should be compulsory to

everyone", she would say regularly later in life.

"Then you will come to realize what's important

in life and what isn't."

 

—Christiane Ritter, A Woman in the Polar Night

1938 / Foreward by Sara Wheeler

 

 

"Then the sea does nothing at all"

 

"One evening I went down to our live-box to get

some fish for the cat and dropped my knife in

the water, which made me think about what the

island looked like down there where it started

- maybe a broad base that lost itself in the long,

deserted ocean floor - less and less seaweed, more

and more darkness, absolute silence…"

 

"And she notes that you never know with the

weather. Suddenly the sea level rises - clearly

strong wind coming. The sea sinks catastrophically

- there will be a storm. Then the sea does nothing

at all, and pretty soon the wind’s blowing your ears

off. She adds that in fact all the facts and statistics

are idiotic, because the sea does precisely whatever

it wants.

[…] At the end of her notebook Ham wrote,

underlined, “We must not gild the lily.” Yes, yes,

I know, probably from the Bible. And I know

exactly what she meant - that we’ve tried to make

the meadow into a garden, change the thicket into

a park, tame the shore with a dock, and all the

other things we’ve undeniably done wrong."

—Notes from an island

Tove Jansson & Tuulikki Pietilä

 

the island

 

 

 

grey fox / red mountain

 

 

grey fox / red mountain [and details]

mixed media on grey cardboard 40x40 cm

 

soon available in my shop