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\u201cIn Greenland, one discovers, as though for the first time, what beauty is,\u201d Rockwell Kent wrote in 1935. \u201cGod must forgive me,\u201d he continued, \u201cthat I tried to paint it.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a feeling that anyone who\u2019s taken a photo of the sunset knows: It\u2019s hard to capture the beauty of a moment through any medium. You had to be there.<\/p>\n
But that didn\u2019t deter Kent. He painted Greenland, in his own words, \u201cincessantly.\u201d He wrote effusively and extensively of its beauty, its people and its hold over him.<\/p>\n
In a world of constant digital distraction \u2014 the goal of this column is to try to get you to slow down, but we know all too well that we\u2019re asking you do this by looking at a screen \u2014 there\u2019s something alluring about the world shown here:<\/p>\n
a man,<\/p>\n
his dogs<\/p>\n
and his paints,<\/p>\n
humbled by a monumental iceberg.<\/p>\n
Yet in 1934, Kent himself was feeling distracted and annoyed.<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause modern American life irks him, Rockwell Kent, artist, left New York yesterday on the liner Deutschland on a trip to Greenland,\u201d reported The New York Times.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo get away from the annoyances of New York life, automobiles, radios, cocktail parties and such is a wonderful experience in itself,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Kent, a swashbuckling American painter, writer, political activist and book illustrator, made three trips to Greenland from 1929 to 1935. The first trip ended in a shipwreck where he lost many of his painting supplies. Later, he built a house, lived (and loved) among the locals and established himself in a small community hunting, writing, exploring and, most important for us, painting.<\/p>\n
He turned his nine-foot-long sledge into a mobile studio by mounting his canvas to the stanchions to create an easel.<\/p>\n
He\u2019d gather his dogs in a fan formation and drive them out into the landscape, ready to paint.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019d halt my dogs, swing the sledge into precisely the position that I wanted it, lay out my paints and brushes, get to work,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s the scene we find here: an artist at work.<\/p>\n
The striking diagonal of the iceberg is echoed in the shapes of the dogs staring back at us:<\/p>\n
Slanted lines run throughout the landscape:<\/p>\n
Take a look back here, at the mountain peeking around the corner.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe didn\u2019t like abstraction and he was a champion of realist painting, and I think that\u2019s kind of true and that\u2019s kind of not true,\u201d said Virginia Anderson, a senior curator at the Baltimore Museum of Art.<\/p>\n
She directed my attention to this mountain \u2014 the dark brown underpainting with blue streaks creating the relief of the cliff surface. When you zoom in close, it looks abstract.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut then when you pull back, it really resolves beautifully into the way that light would flow across that surface in a really indirect way,\u201d she said. \u201cHe really nailed it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The gradient above this dark spot glows, as the electric teal sky dissolves into a warm yellow:<\/p>\n
At the center of it all, there\u2019s the bold top face of the iceberg soaking up the sun in a warm white-yellow:<\/p>\n
These connect to the other highlights across the canvas,<\/p>\n
but each is different \u2014 some a bit warmer, some a bit cooler, absorbing, reflecting and reacting to the light around them.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe beauty of those northern winter days is more remote and passionless, more nearly absolute than any other beauty I know,\u201d Kent wrote.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is so overwhelming and it is so indescribable how beautiful it is and how humbling it is in terms of scale,\u201d the photographer Denis Defibaugh told me. Inspired by Kent\u2019s journeys, Mr. Defibaugh has taken several trips to Greenland to document the people and the landscape<\/a>.<\/p>\n Here, in the fall of 2016, he captured a similar sky:<\/p>\n \u201cYou get such pure color there because there\u2019s no pollution. There\u2019s nothing changing the light and the sky except reality.\u201d<\/p>\n This simple world of blue sky, white snow and brown mountains becomes anything but.<\/p>\n Look again at the colors Kent used on the side of the iceberg facing us. Warm oranges scuff across cool blues. Purples are dancing with greens:<\/p>\n