Fran Beallor wanted to be an astronaut as a kid. Now, artists, curators and educators have drawn a series of glaciers based on NASA satellite imagery. “Portrait of glaciers”, using colored pencils on paper to show glaciers from around the earth. Two works in the series will unfold in “The Sound of Water” on April 23, at “The Sound of Water” at Hudson Guild Galleries in New York City and April 24.
The two exhibitions are part of the Hudson Guild’s “Art Response” initiative, which brings together over 90 works of art by 38 artists. They explore the artist’s vulnerability, resilience and hope to the environment, inviting viewers to reflect on climate change.
Julie Reiss, a lecturer and art historian who teaches in Columbia University’s Sustainability Management Program, notes that artists and young people are increasingly interested in exploring how we adapt to climate change. Reiss told Glacierhub that they imagined what the new world would look like, rather than “like a frightening dystopia.”
Painting was not what Beallor wanted to do as an artist in his early years. But after becoming a new mother of two, painting became the only way to practice again. When she rediscovered a notebook, when she was 20, she decided to move on again at 40 and then again at 50.
I sat down with Bealor to talk about her artistic choices, her thoughts on the interconnectedness of humans and nature, and the deeper meanings of these works for her.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for simplicity and clarity.
Why did you decide to represent the artist’s work?
In 2004, when my kids were about six and eight, we cruised on a boat on the inner passage in Alaska. I have always loved the idea of nature and glaciers, but I haven’t seen them in person or actually experienced them. Next to them is magnificent. It’s hard to explain how wide they are, and you feel very small on the boat. From near the ship, they are huge and magical. I fell in love with the glaciers at that time. The idea of their melting and disappearing goes beyond the tragedy.
The glaciers you depict span the world from Argentina to Antarctica. How do you choose which glaciers in this series?
They are all amazing, so it’s almost OK. I’ve been looking for visually compelling images. There are not many glacier places either. They are all located in the polar regions of Greenland, Iceland, Alaska, Antarctica, Patagonia. It is an aesthetically huge driving force.
Can you tell me more about the aesthetic choices you made?
I looked down at the terminal as we flew over the Alaska coastline. They are like creatures over time. As they move, they drag the earth with them and create patterns. From the plane, they resemble long roads, like giants, using giant tractors to draw plow lines on the earth. In my dream, I took pictures of Iceora, but a few years later, I found that there wasn’t. Moraines is covered up in my memory, but I have no photos to work with. So my husband suggested that I use open source NASA aerial satellite image.
For frames, most of the time I print the entire satellite image and carry it with me to get the work I want. Other times, I looked at the satellite image and drew the parts I wanted. It takes about a week to choose materials, colors and satellite composition. I will work for a week and a few hours in a week. I work very slowly and like to build color layers. So it might start to pale and then when I get to the top I build it with a more saturated color.
What makes the glacier portrait?
Recently, I read Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer and what she wrote resonated with me. In Potawatomi language, trees, rocks, wind and things are not nouns, but verbs. They are still alive. They are all part of our family. From this perspective, glaciers are more than just ice. The glacier has been there for millions of years. The fact that we can lose them in a human is frightening. So I want to remember them, honor them, respect them, apologize to them and share with people. I want to say, “Look, that’s what we are losing.”
My drawings tend to be more realistic and sometimes a little surreal. However, what I found to attract glaciers from this aerial perspective is that they look abstract when in reality, they are not. They are the realistic effects of a particular position at that particular moment. For me, it is a metaphor for overwhelming and abstract concepts of climate change and planetary losses. But when you really take a little time to look at them, they are intimate. It attracts a person and makes them feel more connected.
In “The Sound of Water”, photographer Camille Seaman approaches her iceberg photo as a portrait of her personal. When I read that, I was like, “Yes, I feel the same way!” She went on to say that her iceberg photos “like family photos of my ancestors.” This gave me chicken skin ump because she was talking about reminding me that the ice and water in these glaciers were so old, like drawing a very old person with so many personalities. For me, the idea of conveying them as portraits of ancestors is really intense.
“Portrait of the Glacier” seems to be a series of painting dialogues with a series of self-portraits “self”. What stories do you try to tell differently with the “glacier portrait”?
I think everything we do is self-portrait. No matter how similar the two artists are, they always differ if they use their true style. This style is a fingerprint that marks our vision and how we observe. In this sense, artworks are always self-portraits because they reflect the way the artist agrees with the subject.
If glaciers are somehow self-portraits, what does it mean if they disappear?
The glacier is melting. As they disappear, so do our environment and ultimately our ability to survive. Maybe it’s not the glacier that reflects us, maybe we are their self-portraits. The earth comes first and creates us, so we are the representative of the life part of the earth.
