Entry Five: The Art of Vanishing – Of What’s to Come
There’s a certain kind of work that begins not with certainty, but with a hunch, a sense that if you follow the thread long enough, something true might appear at the other end. That’s how I feel about what I’ll be doing in the Arctic. It’s not only a journey north, but a journey inward, into the quiet machinery of art, heat, and time.
I’ll be painting, filming, and thinking about loss, not in the sentimental sense, but in the physical one: how things disappear. But not on the ship itself. There, I’ll be sketching, observing, and listening, surrounded by scientists, explorers, and fellow artists who are each tracing their own vanishing worlds. The Arctic voyage is the beginning, a time to gather impressions, data, numbers, fragments, and conversations that will later find their way into the work.
Exploring on the Ice. Photo: Sarah Gerats, The Arctic Circle
My tools are unusual. I work with thermochromic pigments, colors that fade or vanish when exposed to heat. The pigments will be encased in heated frames, designed and built by my brother-in-law, Gerhard Morawetz, an engineer, craftsman of precision and patience. Together, they turn each painting into a living organism, a fragile system that responds to the world’s temperature the way ice does: silently, irrevocably.
The project will reimagine three lost works:
Rembrandt’s The Storm on the Sea of Galilee (1633), stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990, captures chaos and faith in the same frame. A ship swallowed by waves, men trying to control what can’t be controlled. Repainting it feels less like coincidence and more like a summons.
Klimt’s Philosophy (1897), one of the paintings destroyed in a 1945 fire, was his most ambitious and misunderstood work. It spoke of the unknown currents between birth and death, order and entropy. To reimagine it in a landscape defined by both creation and collapse feels right, like the painting has been waiting for the ice to have its say.
Matisse’s Reading Girl in White and Yellow (1919), stolen from a Swedish museum in 1987, is quieter, domestic, almost tender. A woman, absorbed in her own world, untouched by history’s noise. I chose it because not all loss is violent. Some of it is gentle, almost beautiful, like the slow fade of pigment when the temperature shifts a few degrees too high.
Alongside the paintings, I’ll be working on a documentary, part travelogue, part meditation, comparing images and data of glaciers across three moments in time: when these paintings were first made, when they were lost, and when they are reborn through this project. It’s a way of seeing time not as a straight line, but as overlapping layers of ice, pigment, and story. The melting, both literal and metaphorical, is impossible to ignore.
The Arctic has a way of undoing intention. I’ll arrive with plans, sketches, maybe even confidence, and the place will unmake them, remold them into something else. That’s the point. It’s about what might not happen as much as what will.
This post is a wide shot, an introduction to what’s ahead. Over the next six entries, I’ll dive into the details:
The thermochromic pigments and how they work
Rembrandt’s vanished storm
Klimt’s lost philosophy
Matisse’s missing girl
The heated frames
The documentary itself
For now, I’m preparing, sketching, painting, testing, writing, thinking, letting the story find me as much as I find it.
“Chance is the twin of uncertainty”
