November 22, 1995 In this journal entry I am headed fifteen miles out of McMurdo Station with Antarctic guide Buck Tilley. We have been riding out a sudden storm in zero visibility, and rather than move, we wait for visibility to improve. We are driving in a Hagglund tracked vehicle upon the frozen ice of the Ross Sea. I am out here to do some painting, although the weather is bleak and temperatures are hovering around -25F degrees.
A clearing of the blow allows us to move out towards Turk’s Head. Once there I begin another sketching session as Buck takes the Hagglund a half-mile closer to the glacial tongue. I am exposed and the wind whips around me as I sit on bare ice with a pad of sketch paper for insulation. It is too cold to paint; the oils turn to the consistency of chewing gum in just minutes. Instead, I use a pencil to describe the contours of the ice-fall. For color notes I have a reference book that I developed back home during the months before coming to Antarctica. It consists of fifty pages of treated canvas approximately six inches by nine inches. Each page takes a single color and breaks that color down into five progressive tints of white. These columns are then mixed with fifteen separate colors creating a total of fifty color blocks on each page. I use this reference book as a color chart. Speaking into a micro cassette recorder I can key individual colors as my eyes peruse the scene. This way I do not have to mix color in severe cold. My notes appear as a peculiar personal calligraphy. A warm reddish gray patch of stone might read as “IR3/CLD”. I will decode this later in the warmth of my New Mexico studio. Out here it is literally a battle to bring back the essence of a scene for future reconstruction. Such shorthand pieces have their own charm and I am reminded of the famous travel portfolios of Turner, Constable, Moran, and Church, to mention a few. I feel certain they would have loved to be sitting where I am right now.
