I began with polar bear portraiture. An easy decision, as portraits were my specialty, and polar bears make for inspiring subject matter. Here's why -
Polar bears are beautiful, powerful, top- of -the- arctic- food- chain bears, with loads of personality.
Polar bears are really smart (think ape) and know how to play (so smart). Research scientist, Alison Ames has seen them stack heaps of plastic pipes, then knock them down in elaborate games.
They're really big, the world's largest carnivore. The record setter was about 2000 lb.
They have a distinctive silhouette, thick white fur (it's not really white), small furled ears, dark brown eyes and black nose are recognizable to most, but more individual than one would imagine.
And those wide furry paws, with papillaed pads, act as snow shoes on ice. In water, the slightly webbed front paws paddle and the elongated back paws serve as rudders. Snow shoes, paddles, there's a Canadian cliche hiding in there.
In 2015, I had my aha! moment when I listened to Curator Barbara Matilsky talk at the opening of the brilliant Vanishing Ice: Alpine and Polar Landscapes in Art, 1775-2012(McMichael Canadian Art Collection. Kleinberg, ON). She connected the dots between climate change, changing landscapes, art, science and vanishing ice in this show, and for me, too. I realized that my concern about polar bears went hand-in-hand with my long time concern about water, and that it was that relationship between water and polar bears that was missing for me in my bear art.
Since then, I have done what I can to educate myself about polar bears, vanishing sea ice, and climate change. I've made a trip to the arctic, Cape Dorset and Iqaluit, Nunavut, and another to the subarctic, Churchill, Manitoba. I've had the good fortune to put in two days on the magical Tundra Buggy, where the polar bears ( I love you, polar bears) get to regard us a travelling zoo, and to stay at the wondrous Churchill Northern Studies Centre. I've attended lectures, some great ones by Brandon LeForest, WWF polar bear expert. I've done the appropriate follows of polar bear organizations, leaders and scientists on social media.
I learned about "dark water", defined in my lay(wo)man's terms-
The bright white polar cap serves as a giant reflector for the sun’s heat. In other words, it’s like a great, big air conditioner for our planet. Carbon emissions cause climate changes that result in dramatic arctic ice loss, over 56,000 square kilometres per year since 1979. The increase in the dark water means less sun reflects back into space, and the earth absorbs more heat. Increased absorbed heat means increased ice loss, which means increased dark water , which means decreased sun reflected, which means increased heat absorbed, and… you get the picture, how the cycle, pardon the pun, snowballs.
This loss of sea ice, and expanding water mass, has a dramatic effect on the survival of the polar bear, which, by the way, is the only bear that is a marine mammal. This great white bear depends on the sea ice for hunting, feeding and occasionally denning.
The delay in the formation of the sea ice, leaves the baby polar bear more vulnerable to attack by hungry male polar bears. The increased open water means the distance a mother polar bear must travel, polar bear cub(s) on back, before ice is found to rest on or hunt seal from, increases the odds the polar bear bear cub(s), and even the mother, will make it safely to the ice top.
In my painting, the award winning Dark Water 1 (private collection,) a beautiful polar bear, floats in dark water, its body twisted in the form of a question mark. How far out of the picture frame does the ice wait? As in real life, it is up to us to decide if what happens next results in a happy ending.
