Sunday, May 30, 2010

Drawing Antarctica

Nick Hutcheson is making time-lapse drawings of the Antarctic Landscape; they can be viewed here: http://www.vimeo.com/album/231684

About the project, Hutcheson states: "In 2008 I spent 8 weeks as an Artist in Residence for the Australian Antarctic Division drawing frantically as I journeyed in and around the continent. On my return, the challenge has been to try and capture some of the Antarctica I experienced. Out there, you have a constant awareness of movement and time. Some of it is so slow - gigantic icesheets flowing towards the sea at seemingly imperceptible rates ­ but then, you can also
watch the sea water become ice, and weather fronts moving across the horizon. And the majority of what makes up the landscape is frozen water. It's defined by this ever-creeping whiteness ­ in compositional terms, a mass of negative space. How to deal with this in the drawings I was making? At the start of the year, in response to this dilemma, I began to play with making very short animations, sort of time-lapse drawings of the landscape."

His animated works are fluid, short, and powerfully evocative.