<![CDATA[Antarctic Paintings - David Rosenthal Blog]]>

<![CDATA[Antarctic Paintings - David Rosenthal Blog]]>Sat, 27 Apr 2024 22:58:02 -0700Weebly<![CDATA[Join me in Fairbanks, Alaska at Well Street Art Co.]]>Fri, 02 Sep 2022 01:55:25 GMThttps://antarcticpaintings.com/art-and-science-david-rosenthal-blog/join-me-in-fairbanks-at-well-street-art-coPacked up many boxes of paintings and am now in Fairbanks for the "Home Revisited" art show. The Show is opening, tomorrow September 2nd and will be there through October 4th 2022 at the Well Street Art Co. in Fairbanks, Alaska. Join me there. Below Crescent Moon over Sheridan Lake original oil on painting.

]]><![CDATA[Heading to Fairbanks for Art opening]]>Sat, 20 Aug 2022 19:54:42 GMThttps://antarcticpaintings.com/art-and-science-david-rosenthal-blog/heading-to-fairbanks-for-art-openingThis coming week I will be traveling to Fairbanks for the opening of the art exhibit "Home Revisited" Please join me on opening night Friday September 2nd. As I travel I am enjoy the stops along the way where I have the opportunity to sketch landscapes and consider the changes of an area I have visit before.
More information

Full Moon over Sheridan Glacier Lake in Cordova, Alaska, 2022 original oil on linen painting by David Rosenthal

]]><![CDATA[Pratt Museum - Painting at the End of the Ice Age show.]]>Wed, 06 Apr 2022 20:38:32 GMThttps://antarcticpaintings.com/art-and-science-david-rosenthal-blog/pratt-museum-painting-at-the-end-of-the-ice-age-showThank you all for supporting the opening of the traveling exhibit "Painting at the End of the Ice Age" at the Pratt Museum in Homer on April 1st. The exhibit will be at the Pratt Museum through May. Next stop for this exhibit is the lower 48 United States. As your local museum when they will be bringing the exhibit to your town.

]]><![CDATA[Painting at the End of the Ice Age - Grand Opening]]>Sat, 14 Aug 2021 00:38:09 GMThttps://antarcticpaintings.com/art-and-science-david-rosenthal-blog/painting-at-the-end-of-the-ice-age-grand-opening

]]><![CDATA[Don't miss this Grand Opening in Cordova in September!]]>Sat, 14 Aug 2021 00:31:52 GMThttps://antarcticpaintings.com/art-and-science-david-rosenthal-blog/dont-miss-this-grand-opening-in-cordova-in-september

]]><![CDATA[Catalogue Complete for traveling exhibit]]>Tue, 13 Apr 2021 18:59:47 GMThttps://antarcticpaintings.com/art-and-science-david-rosenthal-blog/catalogue-complete-for-traveling-exhibitPainting at the End of the Ice Age exhibit catalogue and free ebook are complete! See them now.
]]><![CDATA["Painting at the End of the Ice Age" book is here!]]>Tue, 13 Apr 2021 18:31:50 GMThttps://antarcticpaintings.com/art-and-science-david-rosenthal-blog/painting-at-the-end-of-the-ice-age-ebook-is-freeA few months ago the catalogue that accompanies the traveling exhibit "Painting at the End of the Ice Age" was completed. If you would like a copy you can purchase it in Cordova, Alaska at Cordova Gear the online store Alaska Adventure Shop.
As the exhibit travels, the hope is that people will learn about science, art and history and be compelled to think about changes we can make to slow climate change.
]]><![CDATA[Art and Science: Painting at the End of the Ice Age preview]]>Tue, 13 Apr 2021 07:00:00 GMThttps://antarcticpaintings.com/art-and-science-david-rosenthal-blog/art-and-science-painting-at-the-end-of-the-ice-age-previewThis exhibit is primarily an art exhibit, but science is also involved. The individual paintings can be appreciated as works of art that reveal the beauty in nature that has inspired me to paint. Taken together, they serve to illustrate the dynamic landscapes where the Ice Age is still ending.

Childs Glacier before 1800

Unfortunately, in the last six years, the glacier face has been retreating from the river. Calving is rare and the face of the glacier is now a low-angle slope that barely reaches the river at high water.
Miles Glacier is a much larger glacier up river from Childs Glacier. In 1910, a large trestle bridge was built across the Copper River for a railroad that would connect the copper mines at McCarthy to the port of Cordova. The bridge became known as the “Million Dollar Bridge” and still stands. Standing on the bridge today, one can see MilesGlacier about five miles away to the east. In 1910, just as the bridge was completed,Miles Glacier, which had been only a mile away, surged to within 1500 feet of the bridge. From that point on, it has retreated up to its mountain valley, leaving a lake inits place where the Copper River flows.
Childs Glacier and Miles Glacier are very accessible from Cordova. The Million Dollar Bridge was just a 50-mile drive out of town, on a road built on the old railroad bed.
I spent a lot of time watching the glaciers and hiking on and around them. A lot of my work has been inspired by these glaciers, and the knowledge I have gained from observing them has guided me in my work painting glacial landscapes around the world.

Information
Glaciers
Glaciers are large accumulations of ice that move downhill, driven by the force of gravity. They usually form high in mountains where more snow falls than melts. The snow accumulates over hundreds or thousands of years, and is compressed by its own weightinto ice. The weight of thousands of feet of ice forces the ice to flow downhill like a frozen slow motion river. The glacial ice flows from the accumulation zone in the mountains downto lower elevations where it melts or calves. When the ice melts or calves faster than it is replenished from snow up above, the glacier terminates.
Glacial Retreat
When glaciers terminate in a zone of cold temperatures where there is little melting, the downward force translates into a horizontal force pushing the ice across the landscape. Mountain glaciers can be pushed many miles from their source, even out to sea. If the climate warms and a glacier calves or melts faster, the glacier can lose mass faster than it is replaced, and the ice melts or calves before reaching as far as it did before the change. Over time, the glacier terminus gets closer to its source, and the glacier appears to retreat back up its valley. Everybody uses the term “retreat” to describe glaciers that are diminishing, but infact, no ice reverses direction to flow uphill as “retreat” implies.
Moraines
Moraines are the piles of rocks, gravel and sand that a glacier grinds off of the bed that itmoves on. At the terminus of the glacier, the rock debris is continually deposited and over time forms a terminal moraine that can be hundreds of feet high. On the sides of the glacier, rock debris from the glacier grinding against the valley walls piles up along the side of theglacier, forming a lateral moraine. When glaciers come together as they flow out of adjacentvalleys, their lateral moraines join and form a medial moraine, seen as a line of rock in
the middle of the glacier formed by the joined glaciers. Moraines, old and new, mark the movement of the glacier over time.
Calving Glaciers
An advancing glacier flowing down its mountain valley can eventually leave behind the confines of the valley walls and can spread out into a lobe of ice miles wide. As the ice spreads out, it gets thinner and exposes more surface area to melting. The flow of ice slowsand equilibrium is reached so the loss of ice from melting matches the rate of replenishment.The lobe of ice can remain static for years until conditions changes significantly. However, when a glacier flows down a valley and reaches tidewater or a large lake or river, the glacier,only supported by water, sheds ice by calving icebergs, revealing the full thickness of the glacier as a towering wall called the glacier face.

The Color of Glaciers
Glaciers often appear blue. Glaciers are made of water ice. Water molecules absorb most
of the long wavelengths of visible light, but transmit the short wavelengths such as blue. Depending on weather, ice surface conditions, and sun direction, the blue of glaciers changes. During the summer, a layer of melting fractured ice covers most of the glaciersurface. The white light of the sun falling on this surface is scattered before being filtered bythe mass of the ice, so it appears white, mixed with some gray and brown surface dust. Inthe winter, the fractured surface ice is many times sealed by rainwater filling the cracks andfreezing. The ice surface becomes transparent and the white light from the sun penetrates. The water molecules absorb the long wavelengths of light such as red and yellow. The bluelight penetrates until it hits random ice fractures and impurities, reflecting back out, makingthe ice seem to glow blue. The more transparent the ice, the more the light penetrates, andthe more it is filtered, appearing deeper blue or even black. Where ice is freshly calved, theice appears bluer because the ice revealed is less weathered and more transparent. On acloudy day, there is less white reflected light, and the scattered light filtered through theglacier is more obvious.
Glacier colors are made more complex by the colors projected on the ice by the low-anglesun. The most difficult colors to create for my paintings come from the red light of a sunset reflected on top of the blue green glow of glacier ice.

The Color of Glacial Streams and Lakes
The heavy loads of ground rock or silt in the meltwater from glaciers makes the streams, rivers and lakes formed by glacial melting to appear muddy gray or brown.
As the silt settles in lakes and in the ocean, the finer particles stay suspended longest andgive the water a milky blue-green cast.

Columbia Glacier
Columbia Glacier is a large tidewater glacier originating inthe snowfields northwest of Prince William Sound. In the late seventies, when I first saw it, the face of the glacier waseasily accessible.

Columbia Glacier view to the east at sunset

Columbia Glacier in mist at Sunset 2012

The Retreat of the Columbia Glacier
Columbia Glacier was the last tidewater glacier to retreatto a pre-Little Ice Age state. In about 1980, the glacierterminus was a 300-foot wall of ice, grounded on a terminalmoraine that crossed Columbia Bay from Heather Island tothe mountains on the west side of the bay. The fact that it was the last to retreat and the glacier’s proximity to the oil tanker shipping lanes got a lot of attention from scientists.

One of the best known scientists who studied Columbia Glacier was Austin Post. He was a self-taught glaciologist who started out monitoring the glaciers along the Gulf Coast using aerial photography. Later he would study the glaciers in Prince William Sound, including Columbia Glacier, from the “Growler,” a small research boat. By some accounts, as early as the 1960s, Austin began
to suspect that Columbia Glacier was going to retreat rapidly. The conventional wisdom, however, was that Columbia Glacier was a very healthy stable glacier. Eventually the same climatic forces that made the other glaciers retreat would cause Columbia to slowly retreat, but not for a long time in the future. Austin believed
that more than climatic forces needed to be considered. Austin realized that while the glacier remained grounded on its moraine, it would be stable. When it started toretreat off the moraine, the massive glacier floating on the deep waters of the fjord would be unsupported and would start to break up rapidly. Austin would
later be proven correct. The Glacier retreated off its moraine in the early 1980s and then rapidly disintegrated leaving a beautiful fjord. Not just for his predictions of Columbia Glacier’s retreat but also for a lifetime of work in glaciology, Austin Post was awarded an honorary PhD from the University of Alaska in 2004, and was well-respected by his fellow scientists.
More recently, I have gotten information on the retreat of Columbia Glacier from Rob Campbell, a scientist who has been involved with studying the glacier’s current retreat. He passed on information from projects he has worked on and from other scientists. Most of the information is way too technical for an artist or for an art show, but there was some interesting information that points to the future of Columbia Glacier. On the satellite image of Columbia Bay, there is a red line drawn on the glacier. This line represents the TWL or tide water limit. This is where the glacier bed is at sea level. When the glacier retreats back to this line, it will be supported by bedrock and so it will slow its calving and will probably remain in equilibrium for many years, and that will be the maximum extent of the fjord until rising sea levels push the TWL back farther.

The Legendary Copper River Glacier
During my forty years observing Childs and Miles glaciers, I have seen significantchanges. These glaciers are retreating rapidly as the result of climate change. The warming of the world has been going on since the great ice sheets began to retreat, but has accelerated in the last hundred years because of human activity. The burning of fossil fuels is releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, trapping heat. Temperatures are rising around the world, and rising fastest in the polar regions and high-latitude temperate regions where glaciers still exist. As I witness the retreat of the glaciers at the end of the Ice Age, I am captivated by thoughts of glacial landscapes in the past.
In 1914, the National Geographic Society published a book titled “Alaskan Glacier Studies”. The book was written by Ralph Tarr and Lawrence Martin, and was basedon field work done before 1913. The book has been a great source of informationabout the glaciers and their history. The authors give detailed accounts of the retreat and temporary expansions of Miles and Childs glaciers, as well as a number of otherglaciers terminating in the vicinity of the Copper River. In addition to their own field work, they used accounts from earlier explorers as far back as 1850 to create adetailed picture of the history of the glacier. But what really caught my attention wasthis passage from their book briefly remarking on the glacier history before 1840.

Anyone looking at the Copper River and its delta can see evidence that all theseglaciers came together in one glacier that flowed towards the Gulf of Alaska, covering the Copper River and its delta. I have not found much scientific literature detailingthe history of the Copper River Glacier, but as an artist, I can speculate about it. My imagination has led me to paint some glacier scenes from the past, including a series of recent and historical views of Childs and Miles glaciers.

Sheridan Glacier
The glacier I am most familiar with is Sheridan Glacier. It isclose to my home in Cordova, about an 18-mile drive fromtown. I have spent countless hours hiking on the glacier and ice skating on the lake that has been left by its retreat.
I have painted many scenes featuring the glacier, the icebergs, the lake and the post glacial landscape. In this exhibit, there are paintings of the Sheridan Glacier that were painted over many years. The paintings clearly show the glacier retreating. I have been inspired to paint so many paintings of Sheridan Glacier because it has been changing constantly. Even day-to-day, there are changes. Witnessing the changes over forty years has, more than anything, made me feel I am witnessing the Ice Age ending.
There are a number of other glaciers represented in this exhibit. They were selected because I have spent time drawing and painting them. I cannot describe them all in words, so I will let the paintings speak for themselves.

Sheridan Glacier 1996

Sheridan Lake 2013

Childs and Miles Glaciers
When I first saw Childs Glacier in the late 1970s, its 300-foot high, mile-long active face would calve ice towers into the Copper River all summer long. The sight of the towers of ice falling into the river, generating huge waves that would sweep across the river and break on the shore, was a spectacle I never tired of.

Childs Glacier before 1800

Childs Glacier 1977

Child Glacier 2017

Miles Glacier 1884

Miles Glacier 2017

]]><![CDATA[Working on my mini water color classes on instagram]]>Thu, 07 Jan 2021 01:40:26 GMThttps://antarcticpaintings.com/art-and-science-david-rosenthal-blog/working-on-my-mini-water-color-classes-on-instagramI have been enjoying the process of teaching via mini video classes on instagram. You can follow me on instagram:
david_rosenthal_alaskan_artist
Some of the people who have been following my mini water classes have have asked how to purchase my work. Here is a link that shows some of my work that can be purchased online. More pieces will be added soon. You can also stop by Cordova Gear in Cordova, Alaska to see some of my work. I am preparing to do more intense classes soon, if you are interested, click here to sign up include your name email address, phone and if you are interested in drawing, water color or oil class. Include a little about your experience if any.
You will be added to my mailing list for art classes and will receive information about upcoming classes.

]]><![CDATA[2020 Calendar New Paintings by David Rosenthal]]>Sun, 08 Dec 2019 22:51:41 GMThttps://antarcticpaintings.com/art-and-science-david-rosenthal-blog/2020-calendar-new-paintings-by-david-rosenthal

Just in time for the holidays. My new 2020 Calendar shows off some of my most recent paintings. Available at Alaska Adventure Shop

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