At first glance these are photographs of Greenland's icebergs: blue-white towers of ice floating on still, dark water. Look closer and they turn out to be drawings. The American artist Zaria Forman makes them with soft pastels, working the pigment into the paper with her fingers, and her large Arctic and Antarctic seascapes are a record of polar ice in a warming world.
Who is Zaria Forman?
Zaria Forman was born in 1982 in South Natick, Massachusetts. She grew up travelling with her mother, Rena Bass Forman, a fine-art photographer who spent the last decade of her life photographing glaciers and remote landscapes. Those trips to wild places shaped Zaria's own work. She had her first solo show in Saratoga Springs, New York, in 2005, and her drawings have since been shown widely, including at Banksy's Dismaland in 2015 and at the Climate Museum in New York in 2017.
Chasing the Light: the 2012 Greenland expedition
Rena Bass Forman had planned a voyage to Greenland retracing the route of the American painter William Bradford, who sailed into the Arctic in 1869 to paint its icebergs and light. She died in 2011 before she could make it. In August 2012 Zaria led the expedition herself, sailing along the coast of Greenland. She called the project Chasing the Light.
The trip changed her subject matter. Until then she had avoided drawing ice; afterwards it became the centre of her work. Her Greenland series records a landscape that is changing quickly as the ice sheet melts, and part of the proceeds from the 2012 drawings went to the climate campaign group 350.org.
How she draws icebergs in pastel
Forman works from thousands of her own photographs and a few small sketches made on site. Back in the studio, she lays down soft pastel and smudges it into the paper with her fingers, building the hard facets of an iceberg, the glassy surface of the water and the reflection between them. Sharp ridges sit next to softly blended reflections, and that contrast is what makes the ice look solid and the sea look liquid.
The scale is part of the effect. Her large drawings average around five by seven and a half feet, and the biggest pieces can take more than 200 hours. The studio photographs below show her up a ladder and working close to the paper, which explains why the finished images feel so immersive.
Later work: Antarctica, the Maldives and NASA's IceBridge flights
After Greenland, Forman spent a month in the Maldives, the world's lowest-lying country, where rising seas threaten the islands, to document the other end of the sea-level story. In 2016 and 2017 she flew with NASA's Operation IceBridge, an airborne survey that measured changes in polar ice, and she travelled to Antarctica aboard the National Geographic Explorer. That voyage led to Antarctica, a 13-piece exhibition at Winston Wächter Fine Art in Seattle in 2017.
Related reading
- Colour-striped icebergs and the colour of glacier ice
- The photographer who quit his job to shoot the north
- Matthew Albanese’s Strange Worlds: Landscapes Made in Miniature
- Simon Beck’s Snow Art: Walking Geometry into Winter Landscapes
paintings are awesome, she's pretty hot too!
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