Entry 034: Going Dark
In German we have a saying. Vorfreude ist die schönste Freude. Anticipation is the greatest joy.
I have anticipated this moment for a year. The entire website carries its name. Thirty-four entries, written almost weekly, from a living room in California, from a kitchen table, from airports and B&Bs. Last August I sat down with my boss and asked for the time off, eleven months in advance. She called it a booze cruise. She was half joking. I did not find it funny. Not because the joke was cruel, it was not, but because it was the first of many mountains I did not know I would have to climb. A year of explaining. A year of watching people hear "Arctic expedition" and file it next to a Caribbean cruise, next to a vacation, next to something you come back from with a tan.
A year of Vorfreude. And now the moment is here, and I can tell you the saying is more complicated than it sounds.
Some things got solved on the way. Many did not. I called Gerhard for weeks about the prototype frame. Months, actually. When I landed in Vienna and he told me it was not ready, I thought he was joking. He was not joking. He worked until three in the morning, soldering heating coils into wood, and handed me the finished frame at the airport at 7:30 the next day. By 8:30 it was on the conveyor belt to Copenhagen. One hour between his hands and the baggage system. That hour is the truest picture of this project I can give you.
The fit test: zero millimeters to spare. On the back, heating coils and ten ventilators doing the disappearing and the returning.
The pigments came out pastel. Softer and chalkier than the deep oils of the masters, and somewhere in the past months I had to accept that a lifelike Rembrandt in thermochromic paint may not be possible the way I first imagined it. The work will have to become something else. I do not know what yet. The frames I want to build, gallery scale, 36 by 36, need money that does not exist. The prototype is the size it is because that is what one man could build in the time there was.
So the stakes are high. Not for anyone else. For me. And being your own worst critic means you never actually arrive at the success you set out for, because the finish line moves every time you approach it. The moment I wrote toward for a year is finally here, and instead of joy I find doubts. About the painting. About the writing. About whether any of it lands.
Here is the thing that gnaws at me. After a year of posting, a year of entries, a year of talking about this to anyone who would listen, I still get the same question. From people who follow me. From people on my own mailing list. Oh cool, what are you doing there? What is this?
Either I am bad at explaining, or the noise is so loud that nothing gets through it. I honestly do not know which. Maybe it is how I use social media. Maybe it is how I frame the project. Maybe climate change is simply not something people want in their feed between vacation photos and lunch. Many puzzle pieces, and I cannot tell which one is missing.
So, one more attempt. Ghosts of the Ice in one sentence: I will attempt to repaint a lost masterpiece in thermochromic pigments that disappears with heat, so you can feel the Arctic vanishing instead of reading about it.
The frame in action. It warms, the bear disappears. It cools, the bear returns. The outline never leaves, that is the point. What stays is what we loose, if we keep going like this. Imagine the Soundtrack: Billie Eilish, "What Was I Made For?" playing.
That is the whole project. It’s about what we loose every day, accept, and can’t or don’t want to see. If that sentence does not survive the noise, no sentence will.
Then there is the art itself. I have painted for a long time. I have sold work, published a book, hung exhibitions. Some people genuinely enjoy what I do, I believe that. But the ones who do not get it, their voices ring just as loud in my head. Too complex. Too abstract. What is this. Someone recently asked me why I “copy” masterpieces, what is unique about that. The same person owns my book. Eighty pages, REVEAL, an entire book answering exactly that question. They bought it. Is anyone reading anything anymore? And I understand the resistance underneath it, because climate change is an overwhelming mountain, and I am no messiah on that mountain. I probably recycle wrong. I am fairly certain my garbage company recycles wrong. But I never had the end goal in sight with anything I have made. Only the direction. In this case: make people feel something about the ice instead of showing them one more chart. How do I get there? I do not know. One step at a time. It has always been one step at a time.
Will I keep painting after this project? I do not know. Will I keep writing? I do not know that either. I refuse to turn myself into a YouTube clown, the hey-guys-welcome-to-my-channel kind. At least that is what I think today. What I will do is attempt to finish some form of this project, pastel pigments or not, funded frames or not. I will attempt to film enough on the ship for a short documentary. What actually happens, I have zero idea.
On Tuesday I board a ship with thirty other artists and scientists. Someone is recording soundscapes that are disappearing. Someone is making a film that travels from Iceland through the Arctic to Japan. Someone has spent twenty years studying polar bears. Someone will make prints using nothing but twenty-four-hour Arctic sunlight. Thirty projects on a forty-nine-meter boat. Mine is one of them, and it is traveling in a duffel bag, wrapped in wool, because a frame full of wires and heating coils is not a conversation you want to have with airport security.
I am writing this from the Danish coast. Svendborg. A place that went past my expectations, and where I still feel foreign here, even though it is Europe, even though I have maintained a 200-day Duolingo streak in Danish, which in practice means I can say “Tak” and then stand there smiling while the rest of the sentence happens to me. From here it is Copenhagen, then Longyearbyen, then the ship. And then nothing. The expedition has been off-grid for eighteen years. No live blogging, barely any wireless, no uploads from the deck. The blog goes dark on Tuesday and the green notebook takes over, pencil and paper.
At least one more entry will come in August, to conclude what this year started. Beyond that, I am not sure what will happen. That is not a teaser. That is the honest state of things.
A year ago the anticipation began, and the German saying promised it would be the greatest joy. The saying was right about the year. It says nothing about what happens when the anticipating ends and the thing itself begins.
The Vorfreude is used up. What comes next has no word yet, in either language.
“Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
