200 Years of Artists Honoring the Miracle of Winter's Water – The Marginalian

Shortly before he formulated his revolutionary laws of planetary motion and shortly after completing the world's first work of science fiction, which put his mother to the test for witchcraft, Johannes Kepler became fascinated by the geometry of ice crystals. A quarter of a millennium later, Michael Faraday would use ice in a landmark experiment that shed light on how an electric charger works, ushering in the Electric Age that defines our modern lives. The transformation of water into ice spells it for scientists and school children alike perhaps because the phase change is so strange. There are few things in nature more surprising, more dazzling, more mind-boggling than the changing conditions, which disrupt our basic ideas about how the world works together, hinting at the fundamental laws by which the universe holds together. Even with all our science behind it, the wonder of the phase shift is so absurd that it retains magic, something mysterious, something with which we can truly tap into the most powerful technology we've invented to fix our confusion in life: art. Here are five artists whose countdowns threw me.

WILSON BENTLEY

Wilson Bentley (February 9, 1865–December 23, 1931) was fifteen years old when his mother, noticing her son's serious curiosity and artistic bent, tried the family ways to give him a microscope for his birthday. For the next four years, while Walt Whitman delighted the world by saying that “a blade of grass is not subject to the work of the stars,” Wilson put every curio he could find under his microscope: blades of grass, pebbles, insects. The day he was able to put a snowflake on a glass plate and taste it very well before it melted, he was blown away. Snowflakes became his life. “Wonders of beauty,” he called them. He began to draw what he saw through his microscope, but felt that his drawings failed to capture the whole wonder before it disappeared into a liquid blur. Although his father was already upset about the boy's artistic deviation from farm work, “opposing snowflakes” rather than pulling potatoes, Wilson somehow persuaded him to invest in a camera.

A few weeks before his twentieth birthday, he installed his new 1.5-inch microscope on his giant camera lens with its accordion-like body fully extended. On January 15, 1880, Wilson Bentley took his first photograph of a snowflake. Amazed by the beauty of the result, he moved his equipment to an unheated wooden shed behind the farmhouse and began to record his work in two different sets of notebooks – one filled with sketches and dedicated to refining his artistic photomicroscopy; the other is full of weather data, carefully monitoring the conditions in which the various snowflakes were taken.

For the next forty-six winters, this slender young man, enchanted by the wonders of nature and paying attention to its smallest manifestations, would hold the air at the microscope camera station and take more than 5,000 pictures of ice crystals – each one is a work of art that disappears and the weakness of the flower and the honeycomb plate of the honeycomb inside the glass of the honeycomb precision. seconds, the ultimate metaphor for the joy and imperfection of beauty, of life itself.

WILHELMINA BARNS-GRAHAM

In 1948, before becoming one of Britain's most respected contemporary artists, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (June 8, 1912–January 26, 2004) joined some friends on a trip to the Swiss Alps. Armed with a pick-axe and a rope, he climbed over snow after snow, amazed by the immensity of the snow, somewhere between the Romantic sublime and a Jules Verne novel. He returned home changed by the experience and began painting. For almost 50 years, he never stopped, drawing out the mysterious magic of glaciers in subtle and impressive paintings, almost mathematical but full of feeling.

He later appeared in the Tate exhibition catalogue:

The great strength and size of the glaciers, the amazing composition, the contrast of hardness and transparency, the many colors seen in the strong light, the warmth of the sun melting and changing forms, in a few days the minimum can be a hole, the hole cut structure has lost its side, the piece can be scattered and fall, breaking the crack and its silence. It was like he was breathing!

RYOTA KAJITA

In his series Ice formationJapanese-born, Alaska-based artist Ryota Kajita captures the natural ice formations in the waters of Fairbanks, Alaska: exotic geometric patterns created by bubbles that form as lake and river water gradually freezes from top to bottom, trapping large greenhouse gases such as methane and carbon dioxide in the ice's crystal lattice.

Beneath the art of this phenomenon may be the scientific key to climate change – Alaskan scientists are studying frozen bubbles to better understand global warming.

ERIK HOFFNER

For a quarter of a year, artist Erik Hoffner has been photographing the shiny skin that grows above the circular holes made by ice fishermen in his series. Ice Visions – mysterious and fascinating images, which remind us of Thomas Wright's 1750 visions of the universe, of Rose-Lynn Fisher's photomicroscopy of tears, of nebulae and craters and chrysanthemums, cell phones and the sky at the same time, but still on earth.

In a piece of prose that is itself a work of art, he writes:

Our world is wild in nature, destroying and re-creating in a process that may seem random but in practice is measured, methodical, and impressive. My inspiration stems from seeking out these wild animals to understand and express their untamed nature, brutal indifference, and orderly beauty.

[The] The series documents the ephemeral formations created by ice fishermen in collaboration with the primordial forces. Holes cut by fishermen in the lake refreeze overnight, creating fertile ground for wild natural art. These extended circles become worlds at once between stars and cells: in the morning light, with small bubbles from below suspended almost magically in place between new inches of snow, these scenes come to life like eyes, galaxies, stars, or mitochondria when rendered in fine detail in black and white.

MEGHANN RIEPENHOFF

A long time ago, when I visited the glass plates of photographs of nebulae and constellations in the archives of the Harvard College Observatory, I was overcome by a paradox – the way we think that photography is immortal, while its very roots do the opposite: making the ephemeral an illusion of eternity, exterminating us on the long edge of our flowers. peer into the light of long-dead stars.

In his amazing project Snowartist Meghann Riepenhoff both celebrates and destroys this temporal paradox in her stunning cyanotype paintings of glacial formations, spending four years plunging into cold waters across this pale blue dot – from Walden Pond to the Seine to the mountain streams of Western Washington's primeval forests – to capture one of the most painful things: change.

In this one collaboration between the landscape, he drew sheets the size of a blanket of photographic paper coated with potassium ferricyanide and ferric ammonium citrate – compounds sensitive to the blue part of the spectrum that spills over to ultraviolet, developed and strengthened only by water and sunlight – to appear with other world images of shiny crystals that turn into shiny crystals that turn into shiny stones.

Coming out of his writings is a kind of magical truth – you look at this frozen water, this symbol of our green earth, and you see the atmosphere of other planets, the feathers of a bird from another undiscovered paradise, the hieroglyphics of ancient civilizations that write the basic wisdom that we have long forgotten.

At the heart of it all is a layered meditation on time and change, on the subtle dance between fluidity and solidity that may be the highest art of life, that something, in being something else, can be fully itself.