Other landscape paintings
There aren’t yet many landscape paintings on this website but they are coming! There probably won’t be any more painting ice on this scale.
Here is a landscape, made of nostalgia as these four are: Your Children are not your Children.
Painting big ice
Just after I turned 40, my husband took a sabbatical from work and we took off, with the children, for a long trip to my Grandmother and Mother’s home country of Norway.
Now as any Norway-lover will tell you, Narnia is to be found here. It certainly seemed so, when growing up in the 60s and 70s, both reading the Narnia books and visiting this beautiful and fairly empty country at regular intervals. Oddly, C. S Lewis himself based Narnia on the Mourne mountains of Northern Ireland, near where he grew up.
If you browse for images of Norway, you may agree with me. Possibly the Scottish Highlands, are also part of Norway. There are even fjords!
Hole in the Glacier
Glacial Ridges
Other Narnias
Pauline Diana Baynes was a great illustrator but she chose pointy, alpine mountains. The Norwegian ones had enormous Ice Age glaciers roll over them and are made of granite.
So much of my childhood is gone the way of everyone else’s. All my mother’s favourite aunts and uncles were no longer with us and it did not feel so much like home.
A number of years after the return from this trip, I decided to reconnect with my inner Norwegian. I learned to knit in the round, with strange purl stitches and all. I still do this and use loud colours to do so. My Ravelry page.
On the other hand, the weather was glorious throughout this summer of 2002. Swimming in the fabulous Sognefjord, off a clean and round expanse of rock, with blue sky above the mountains and (crucially) no red jellyfish, was unforgettable.
We went to see a popular glacier (Nigårdsbreen) up close and it was spectacular. Unsuccessful, if you visit in a hot August with two small children and not enough film. So once we got back, I pillaged my father’s photos of a previous trip. The photos are also Nigardsbreen. This means Nine
Farms Glacier, to mark the number of farms ground under this ice sheet’s rocks. All glaciers carry rocks). The Big Norwegian Encyclopedia spells this name with a single ‘a’, not a ‘å’, but that is incorrect.
Glacier mouth
Glacier Crevasse
After this, I spent months working on sketches, collages and ink daubs. This was painting ice in preparation for a number of sketches in pastel. Eventually, I made the largest four oil paintings I had completed up till then.
After that I gave up oil paints, not enjoying waiting for paint to dry, nor the smell of solvents. More recently, water-soluble oils have tempted me back. They were a lovely few months, covering the 130 x 105cm canvasses with huge amounts of blue and white paint, with accents of brown for rock debris and red or purple for shadows, or even just for fun.
The initial sketches are in a book dated 2005, so a good 3 years after the Norway trip. I am sharing them now because I still love the paintings. They formed the centrepiece of my first solo appearance in the Cambridge Open Studios, I believe that was in the summer of 2005. The Glacier Crevasse painting is one many other people have admired. It is the nearly pure abstract form of this image which I fall into every time I see it.