Friedrich to Gropius: winter tragedies

Caspar David Friedrich. background detail of das Eismeer, 1921

C D Friedrich's das Eismeer is explained at length in an entry on de.wikipedia.  The English wikipedia entry is about 3 paragraphs, the German one is a great long essay that links the tragedies of Arctic exploration with the tragic failed hopes of the German state, plus a lot of painting analysis, studies, influences, parallel works, modern reinvestigations.  The google English translation of this long entry is anarchic in the extreme, sometimes giving up and leaving whole chunks in the original German.  It says something about the metaphoric habit of critical writing on art that a word for word translation is so hilarious. 

The proportions of Friedrich's das Eismeer are very familiar: a great pile of rock or ice leaning to the left, seemingly aspirational but looking backwards.  The focus is at the right hand base of this great pile.  It is a diagrammatic lens that painters still use for the Rockies, especially Mt Rundle which from the Trans-Canada highway lookout, leans steeply to the left and could be neatly mapped onto das Eismeer.

The entry includes Gropius' 1922 Monument to the March Dead in Weimar, memorialising the victims of the Kapp Putsch – again, failure, conflict and defeat.  The vantage point of the photograph take at the time shows the same left-leaning precipice. 

It is the Werther at the heart of the German soul.

Walter Gropius. Monument to the March Dead, 1921-22. Weimar, Germany

Caspar David Friedrich: winter

Caspar David Friedrich. Skizzen von Eisschollen zum Gemälde das Eismeer, 1821. Hamburger KunsthalleFriedrich's studies of ice floes on the Elbe, 1820-21.

Anselm Kiefer: winter

Anselm Kiefer, Gescheiterte Hoffnung (C.D. Friedrich), 2010, Charcoal on photographic paper. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York. Gescheiterte Hoffnung translates as Wreck of Hope.The last of a series of four photographs done for the New York Times: winter.  By far the most memorable image of the series, and perhaps of the year.

The title refers to Caspar David Friedrich's Das Eismeer, an 1823 painting inspired by one of Parry's ships caught in the ice on an expedition to find the Northwest Passage in 1819.

granite, ice and brooms

'tis the season to be curling.  The Galt Museum in Lethbridge posted all their old curling photos at the Lethbridge Curling Club last fall hoping that some of the older curlers could identify the people in them.  It was on the radio and someone from the museum was talking about the very earliest curling there where the rocks were carefully and cunningly selected river boulders with flat bottoms.  A hole was drilled and a handle attached.  These were personal rocks: each curler would learn the peculiarities and weight of each rock, all of which would have been different.

Compare this to the official description of curling stones: 'traditionally, curling stones were made from two specific types of granite called Blue Hone and Ailsa Craig Common Green, found on Ailsa Craig, an island off the Ayrshire coast in Scotland'.  The Ailsa Craig quarry has closed; now granite comes from north Wales: Trefor, in blue-grey and red-brown, and is sent to the Canada Curling Stone Company for manufacture.  However, Kays, the Scottish stone manufacturer that took the last of the Ailsa Craig granite out in 2002, has stockpiled 1500 tons of it and supplies the curling stones for the Olympics. 

Did we want to know any of this?  Well, no, but it is sort of interesting.  Evidently Blue Hone, the preferred stone, does not absorb water, thus escaping freeze-thaw cycles which weaken the stone.  This is all worlds away from going down to the Oldman River and choosing a lovely stone.  If it freezes and cracks, well there are a zillion more there for the taking.

This is a rather sweet film of the Queenshill Cup at Castle Douglas in 1952.  It clearly shows why curlers all hold brooms.  I thought it was to polish the ice. Silly me. 

The Queenshill Cup, Castle Douglas, Scotland. 1952

Nicole Dextras 2

Nicole Dextras. Nylon-arm-dress-light, 2010

Some new work from Nicole Dextras.  On her website she talks about this winter ephemera series, garments frozen in ice, as an investigation into 'nature’s capacity for stability and its capacity for flux: ice is imbued with this sense of duality, the work questions whether such pairings ultimately exist in symbiosis or in contradiction'.

All garments exist in both symbiosis and contradiction with the body, climate, weather, time.  Symbiosis in that we support garments, we are their armature.  Contradiction in that garments have all the immanence that has long preoccupied Peter Eisenman.  That immanence is autonomous, auto-directed. 

Nicole Dextras's deconstructed pieces of clothing never lose their identity, no matter how dispersed they become.  Caught in ice, they appear fugitive, but they really aren't.  They are surprisingly vivid, even durable.  

Nicole Dextras's frozen ephermera

Nicole Dextras. Iceworks.An appropriate image for today.  The other side of ice and snow, here, in Nicole Dextras's work, garments frozen in ice and photographed.  They acquire both an extreme romanticism – the sense of abandoned movement in the garments themselves, and also a kind of forensic tragedy. 

prairie landscapes

Greg Hardy. Distant Rain Across the Marsh, 2008. Acrylic on Canvas, 32" x 64"That carving out a little corner of the wilderness in which to live, seen in colliery and garrison towns and which Margaret Atwood's Survival, her thematic examination of Canadian literature, discusses in depth, has never really been how Canadian prairie artists have seen the landscape and their part in it. 
Perhaps this is because settlement of the prairies, much later than that of eastern Canada, was facilitated by the CPR which didn't carve out settlements, but rather overlaid the great plains with the Dominion Survey Grid, charting the land with a system that made everything equal in importance. 
The land, indifferent as ever to ill-prepared settlers, was, by virtue of its abstract delineation, made to seem disinterested in the people living on it.  The relationship between town and land was not precise: the Homestead Act clustered services at the grain elevator and around the railway tracks.  The land was simply the surface upon which such things occurred. 

Compare this Greg Hardy 2008 painting with the 1962 L S Lowry painting, Hillside in Wales.  Lowry is looking at the land and human occupation, Hardy is looking at the weather.  Lowry's horizon is up near the top of the frame, Hardy's is at the bottom.  This is what I mean about the indifference of the land on the prairies to our little struggles: it floods, it dries out, it freezes, it is hailed upon— all these things would happen whether we were there or not.  Yet the mindset of the early immigrants to the Canadian west had developed in the impacted landscapes of Britain, where centuries of manipulation of the landscape had occurred.  One is constantly driving over surprising hills that turn out to be fragments of Hadrian's Wall or some such thousand year old installation.  People and their activities, their material culture, their animal husbandry, their system of fields, crops, stone walls and complex hedgerow cultivation – all that was irrelevant here.  Wind-scoured fields hundreds of acres square was how the prairies were farmed, and how they are still painted.


Amy Switzer. 2 Word Bird. Ice Follies 2010, Lake Nipissing.

Ice Follies is a biennial exhibition on the 4'-thick ice of Lake Nipissing, this year from February 14-March 20.   Hosted by the WKP Kennedy Public Art Gallery, Ice Follies is – 'eight site-specific artworks that consider or thematically reflect the idea of the ice fishing hut'.  Ice Follies started in 2004 and has some documentation of previous Ice Follies on their website: www.icefollies.ca

Steve Sopinka who wrote about Lake Nipissing's ice fishing huts in On Site 21: weather is one of the artists this year with Out<side>in, an architectural piece that disappears in the wider landscape because it reverses the ice hut tradition of protection, opacity and interiority to an exteriority of perception – of winter, of ice, of the huge space of a frozen lake. 

We have, all around us, artists and designers who think carefully, all the time, of what the architecture of Canada is, with our climate, our weather, our understanding of landscape as a powerful cultural force.  We may huddle in cities, but those cities sit in enormous landforms.  We may have warm houses, buildings, cars and parking garages, but we still come in contact with the weather, no matter where we live.  We have artists, architects and designers who are immensely articulate about being in Canada, and you don't have to look too hard to find them.

Steve Sopinka. Out[side]in. Ice Follies 2010, Lake Nipissing

climate and weather

Steve Sopinka has been discussing with us a project to develop a climate zone map for building.  The climate zone map for planting tells you what species of plants will survive in specific areas and is well known to gardeners.  Calgary is zone 2b because of its elevation, the mountains and its chinooks, föhn winds that come from Pacific weather systems and which wreak havoc with plants who wake up on a balmy January morning thinking it is spring only to be blasted with -30 the next week.  Within zone 2b however there are frost pockets and warm spots.  I live in the lee of the downtown with all those tall buildings blocking the wind and giving off heat and so I can garden to zone 4.  North Bay is zone 3b . Vancouver Island is mostly  7a and b, parts of the Fraser River delta are zone 8, meaning they can grow almost anything.

There is a building corollary to all of this: with each climate zone come various fine-grained built responses.  Tarps, amusing as I find them, are one.  For example. 

We are launching a call to contribute to a database of local building traditions.  This database will include specific examples of local building habits, from form to roof slopes to door placement, with a hazarding of why things are built the way they are.  The stepless door, so famous in Newfoundland, is not about climate, or weather, or materials, but is about social propriety.   The ubiquity of the tarp, a building material in its own right on the west coast, is not about propriety, it is about rain. 

This project is outlined on this page: climate zone building responses.  A rather dull name, but you have to start somewhere. 


small things: ice fishing huts

Paul Whelan. Ice Fishing Hut on Lake Simcoe, 2008.

Both Steve Sopinka and Paul Whelan wrote, in different articles, about ice fishing huts in Ontario for On Site 21: weather.  The Globe & Mail had a piece on them last weekend, and Rob Kovitz has released his long in the making book, Ice Fishing in Gimli. a novel.  Kovitz's book is huge, complex and about Gimli, and winter, and Canada, and takes its name from a study Kovitz did about 10 years ago of the ice fishing huts on Lake Winnipeg. 

Beautifully crafted little pieces of architecture housing one or two people who spend long days in them with a fishing line dropped through a hole in the ice, ice fishing huts are on their way to being one of the enduring and iconic images of the Canadian winter. 

Although a highly individual activity, the collective of huts form a community of sorts, with unwritten rules and oral traditions.  They represent a culture that is local, historic, spatially precise, half-sport, half-social with an architecture that has developed from it.  Perhaps one can buy a little garden shed from Rona or Canadian Tire and adapt it to sitting on the ice, but Sopinka's and Whelan's research indicate that this is not really what happens.  These huts are handmade with considerable care and attention. 

Vernacular architecture is a form of building limited by the scope and scale of the individual builder, working with ordinary tools and found materials: things are put together in ways that make professionals both blanch and wonder why their education battered the impulse to make things out of them. 

Ice fishing huts are small, the tradition is long, the lake is huge. 

James Trevelyan

James Trevelyan. Frozen Lake, 1986. 27 x 20", mixed media on paperThis drawing came up for auction recently.  There are four large Calgary art auctions a year, each with about 600 lots, maybe 400 of which are paintings of the mountains in landscape format, blue skies, sharp shadows on the peaks, snow at the top, usually a river in the foreground.  The views are often recognisable from the road or from hikes radiating out from the old CPR towns - Banff, Lake Louise, Field, Craigellachie, Glacier, Golden and date from the days when artists came from England or Ontario and Québec via the CPR to Banff to paint.  It established a way of looking at the mountains: from a safe distance, from a valley, in the summer.

Today these same towns are ski centres, contemporary art has long turned away from landscape painting, and although there are some brilliant abstract painters of landscapes across the prairies, few look at the mountains and it is rare indeed to find much work painted from the depths of winter.  The obvious reason is that it is bloody cold in the winter. 

Perhaps a less obvious reason is our fear of winter.  The winter on the prairies and in the mountains is not the cozy Group of Seven kind of winter where snow lies like puffy duvets on everything and shadows are a lovely violet or a deep azure.  This is black and white winter, hard and mean. The frozen lake in James Trevelyan's drawing is scoured clean by a high mountain wind, its ice like basalt.  And yet there is a lovely intimacy in this piece, an ambiguity of surface and light that one never finds in work painted on bright sunny days. 

Like lots of Canadians, lots of Canadian artists go to Mexico for the winter.  I'd take this view of a sere, cold, empty, beautiful winter over the florid landscapes of the south any day.  Visually, I get this climate. 

Roger's Pass

Trans-Canada Highway at Roger's Pass, winter.

How to cross something so impenetrable.  Everyone, from First Nations to the railway to the highways followed the rivers, but rivers drop down from summits, and there is always a point where the mountains must be crossed.  The railways drilled long tunnels through mountains, the highways that followed eighty years later couldn't and so we have a series of rather heart-stopping passes throughout BC: Roger's Pass, Crowsnest Pass, the Creston-Salmo Highway, the Coquihalla, the Hope-Princeton.  One approaches them gingerly and with great respect.  

On this drive, three thin lines: the CPR, the CNR and the Trans-Canada are the only visible signs of our occupation of these huge landscapes.  In the winter there is little traffic, campsites and viewing spots are all closed and under 10' of snow, radio is inaccessible, one can drive for miles without seeing another car.  One is thinking of absolutely nothing other than driving and the road.  It is remarkably calm.  Then a truck hurtles by, throws a rock at your windshield and the rest of the trip has a big silver crack across your view.