Chromatic landscapes of Greenland

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Acknowledgments

My sincere gratitude goes to artist Liz Ogilvie for coordinating these opportunities, and to my fellow artists and co-curators who travelled and exhibited with me: Jack Cupples, Jennifer Littlejohn, Malize McBride, Katarina Nöteberg and Jo Vergunst. Vergunst's trip reflections are published in: Jo Vergunst, ‘Fieldwork-Artwork: Icy Inquiries from Greenland’, in: Jane Warrilow and Liz Ogilvie (eds.), Out of Ice: The Secret Language of Ice (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2017), 104–107. Our work was funded by the Carnegie Trust, Edinburgh College of Art, Royal Society of Edinburgh, Russell Trust and the University of Aberdeen.

Some or all of the prints presented here were included in the group exhibitions ‘Avanaa | North’ (Sermermiut Kulturhus, Ilulissat, Greenland, 2010; BKS Garage, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2010; and Galerie Weissraum, Kyoto, Japan, 2011) and ‘collecting | recollecting’ (King’s Museum, University of Aberdeen, Scotland, 2012). The prints in Figures 2 and 3 are included in the collection catalogue for the New Stobhill Hospital, Glasgow, Scotland, see: Lindsay Blair (ed.), The Grace of the Birch: Art Nature Healing, Collection for the Ward Block, New Stobhill Hospital (Glasgow: New Stobhill Hospital, 2011). The prints, as signed and numbered editions, are in private and public collections in the Netherlands, UK and USA.

Notes

1 Colour is defined as: ‘I.1.a. Any of the constituents into which light can be separated as in a spectrum or rainbow, and which are referred to by names such as blue, red, yellow; any particular mixture of these constituents; a particular hue or tint.’; and ‘I.3.a. The quality or attribute by virtue of which something appears to have a colour, so that it may present different appearances to the observer regardless of shape, size, and texture; the sensation corresponding to this, now recognized as dependent on the wavelengths of the light reaching the eye.’, from ‘Colour/Color, n.’, in: Oxford English Dictionary, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/36596, accessed 15 April 2022. Yet, the perception and identification of colour can be impacted by environmental phenomena (such as sun angle, shadow, weather, distance), individual sensory abilities and personal experience.

2 For a thorough exploration of colonial toponymy in Greenland, see: Susanne Schuster, ‘“The Making of Greenland”: Early European Place Names in Kalaallit Nunaat’, in: Brigitte Weber (ed.), The Linguistic Heritage of Colonial Practice, vol. 13, Colonial and Postcolonial Linguistics (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2019), 43–73.

3 For an account of early ideas of the Arctic, see, for example: Christopher P. Heuer, ‘Arctic Matters in Early America’, in: Jennifer L. Roberts (ed.), Scale (Chicago: Terra Foundation for American Art, 2016), 180–214.

4 Polly Gould notes a similarly polychromatic landscape for Antarctica, as expressed in Edward Wilson’s watercolours painted while participating in early twentieth-century British expeditions to Antarctica. See: Polly Gould, Antarctica, Art and Archive (New York: Bloomsbury, 2021), 4; and Polly Gould, ‘Antarctica Through the Archive: A Script’, Opticon 1826 16 (2014). Wilson’s polychromatic landscapes and the prints presented here are separated by more than one hundred years, yet both attest to the polychromicity of the polar regions. While the author does not pretend to predict how the climate crisis will impact the colour palettes of the polar regions, it seems reasonable to expect that they will remain polychromatic, if differently so than what Wilson or the author has witnessed.

5 These works were informed by a site visit to Disko Bay in May 2010.

6 For a survey of use of the colour chart in art, see: Ann Temkin, Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2008). This book accompanied the exhibition by the same name held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City (2008) and at Tate Liverpool (2009); the latter exhibition was visited by the author.

7 Largely dating from the 1960s and 1970s, such works of minimalist, postminimalist and conceptual art focus on format and colour, presented on their own terms, without reference to any external meaning. See, for example: Jim Dine’s Red Devil Colour Chart No. 1 (1963), Gerhard Richter’s 1025 Colours (1974) and Ellsworth Kelly’s Colour Panels for a Large Wall (1978).

8 For examples of such referential work, see Byron Kim’s colour charts based on skin colour (Synecdoche, 1991-ongoing), herman de vries’s colour charts based on soil/earth rubbings (for example, from earth: Deutschland, 2006) and Sherrie Levine’s colour charts based on canonical paintings from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Meltdown, 1989). For examples of analyses of colour in the landscape, see: Margaret Grose, ‘Reading the Colours of Plants at a Finer Scale’, Journal of Landscape Architecture 9/1 (2014), 42–47; Petra Thorpert and Anders Busse Nielsen, ‘Experience of Vegetation-Borne Colours’, Journal of Landscape Architecture 9/1 (2014), 60–69.

9 An interview with Ingolf Skov, the longest-practicing house painter in Ilulissat, on 11 May 2010, revealed that all exterior paint colours are selected from palettes available and imported from Denmark, and that colour selection can be both standardized and arbitrary. For example, public buildings have traditionally been colour-coded according to use (hospitals in yellow, commercial buildings in red, et cetera), yet he painted his own house in aqua green due to a surplus of that colour in Denmark. Skov notes that such exuberant chromaticism in the architecture makes wayfinding easier during whiteout conditions and in the dark winters. Additionally, the reflection of building colours onto the surrounding snow makes the buildings appear to glow. An informal discussion with an Ilulissat resident on the same day noted that the building colours are reflected onto the snow even in the low light of winter, thereby—if, at times, ever so slightly—expanding the architectural palette onto the landscape.

10 Appropriating flag designs and altering their constituent colours is a method adopted here that continues previous work by other artists. Two examples that appropriate the flag of the United States of America are Jasper Johns’s Flag (Moratorium) (1969) lithograph in black, green and gold, made in support of the anti-Vietnam War movement, and David Hammons’s African-American Flag (1990) in the red, black and green of the Pan African flag, made in support of the Black experience.

11 Maria Goula, Anna Zahonero Xifre and Rosa Barba Casanovas, ‘Criterios Para Una Normativa de Color En La Restauración de Canteras’, Geometría 20/June (1995), 70; reprinted in, and English translation from: Carles Herrera (ed.), Rosa Barba Casanovas, 1970-2000: Obras y Escritos / Works and Words, translated by John Wells (Sitges, Spain: Asflor, 2010), 72.

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Notes on contributors

Mark R. Eischeid

Mark R. Eischeid, BS, MLA, MFA, PhD, PLA (CA), is an associate professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Oregon. He is a licensed landscape architect and an artist with prior professional experience in geology. He has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in the United Kingdom, Japan, Denmark and Greenland, and his work is included in public and private collections in the United States, United Kingdom and the Netherlands.