Painting Series: The sky really is a deeper blue here at its polar origins

These paintings began as a series of watercolor postcards I made for friends my first summer working as a science technician at Summit Station—a National Science Foundation research site located at the center of the Greenland ice sheet, on top of two miles of ice near an elevation of 11,000 feet. The paintings were made with meltwater from snow collected at the surface before it had the chance to compress into glacial ice. I wanted to make an atmospheric record of this place in parallel to the scientific one. The paintings also celebrate our impossibly thin, collective atmosphere where even here, thousands of miles from the nearest factory or major highway in a landscape that feels otherworldly, instruments and air samples reveal the fingerprint of our species.

“Whenever we seek to take swift and efficient possession of places completely new to us, places we neither own nor understand, our first and often only assessment is a scientific one. And so our evaluations remain unfinished”

-Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams

Greenland ice sheet, 2018 - 2020