At last...the prospect of a prolonged spell of cold, truly cold weather. Not the sodden snot of the last few weeks, when parts of the country, including the environs of Stonehaven, have seen enough rain to endanger the foundations of 17th Century fortified houses and left the central broken white lines of arterial roads disappearing into nothingness.
I've lifted three nights worth of frozen discs from the water butt in the garden: each one different from the previous, each one testament to the fluctuation in temperature during a frost night. The simple effect of freezing on water producing a wondrous transformation and variation. Small Caspar David Friedrich arctic catastrophes in a bucket. Today's disc also reminds me (as I write) that Scott reached the Pole on this day in 1912.
I've always been a 'winter worker' and found the interplay between the extremes of tonal arrangements in a winter landscape or in a piece of work-monochromes-an area where I can work comfortably. The tonal elements in between become haar, sea fret or other atmospheric anomalies. It's one of the reasons why I became interested in printmaking and it's graphic, monochromatic nature as a predominant means of expression.
It's also why I'm drawn to Pieter Bruegel as a painter. One of the first artists in history to examine, in depth so to speak, how snow and frost effect not only landscape, but human behaviours: it's well recorded that he painted during the 'Little Ice Age', a period between 1400 and the early 1800s and the last of the Frost Fairs on the Thames (I'm sure other great rivers in the country also had their own versions, but the Thames Fairs seem to be the ones which have been most commemorated. With an eye on a quick profit, t'was ever thus, printers set up small printing presses on the ice to produce souvenir chapbooks and pamphlets). The removal of old medieval multi pier bridges which had previously allowed a slow flowing Thames to freeze also had a part to play in the end of these ice festival as much as a warming of the European weather.
As Bruegel's paintings make clear, snow/whiteness can be an element which introduces abstraction and simplification in much the same way as Piet Mondrian used white emptiness in his paintings five hundred years later and influenced artists such as Robert Ryman, Jasper Johns and Peter Doig today.
The world in stasis...paused. In Bruegel's paintings; an opportunity to escape the drudgery of eking out a living in a Flemish world, freedom because normal day to day routines had ground to a halt, to create 'carnivals of winter' or to perpetrate acts of barbarity as in 'The Slaughter of the Innocents'. We are all familiar with snow's ability to make anew the shit and grime of any landscape. But Bruegel's snows and frost are presagers of a deadly period in Northern European climate, one which lasted for 350 years, decimating crops and killing the starving poor, winter after winter. By the time Casper David Friedrich was depicting glaciers, snow and ice in the early 1800s, they had become elements within a dread landscape, at once romantic but also with the ability to kill.