{"id":12338,"date":"2026-01-30T20:41:51","date_gmt":"2026-01-31T00:41:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/200-years-of-artists-reverencing-the-wonder-of-waters-wintry-face-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2026-01-30T20:41:51","modified_gmt":"2026-01-31T00:41:51","slug":"200-years-of-artists-reverencing-the-wonder-of-waters-wintry-face-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/200-years-of-artists-reverencing-the-wonder-of-waters-wintry-face-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"200 Years of Artists Reverencing the Wonder of Water\u2019s Wintry Face \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
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Just before he formulated his revolutionary laws of planetary motion and just after completing the world\u2019s first work of science fiction, which landed his mother in a witchcraft trial<\/a>, Johannes Kepler grew fascinated with the geometry of ice crystals in snow. A quarter millennium later, Michael Faraday<\/a> would use ice in a historic experiment that illuminated how electric charge works, setting into motion the Electric Age that defines our modern lives. The transmutation of water into ice casts its spell over scientists and schoolchildren alike perhaps because phase transition is so profoundly strange. Few things in nature are more astonishing, more dazzling, more confounding to common sense than matter changing states, unsettling our basic intuitions about how the world holds together, hinting at the fundamental laws by which the universe coheres. Even with all of our science behind it, the strangeness of phase transition is so insuperable that it retains an ember of magic, something of the mysterious, something we can only truly touch with the most powerful technology we have invented for plumbing our bewilderment at life: art. Here are five artists whose reckonings with ice have cast their spell on me. <\/p>\n

WILSON BENTLEY<\/h5>\n

Wilson Bentley<\/strong> (February 9, 1865\u2013December 23, 1931) was fifteen when his mother, aware of her son\u2019s sensitive curiosity and artistic bent, strained the family\u2019s means to give him a microscope for his birthday. Over the next four years, while Walt Whitman was exulting a state over that \u201ca leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars,\u201d<\/a> Wilson placed every curio he could find under his microscope: blades of grass, pebbles, insects. The day he managed to place a snowflake on the glass plate and to savor its microscopic perfection before it melted, he was besotted. Snowflakes became his life. \u201cMiracles of beauty,\u201d he called them. He began sketching what he saw through his microscope, but felt that his drawings failed to capture the full miraculousness before it vanished into liquid erasure. Although his father was already irate with the boy\u2019s artistic deviation from farm labor, \u201cfussing with snowflakes\u201d rather than pulling potatoes, Wilson somehow persuaded him to invest in a camera. <\/p>\n

Weeks before his twentieth birthday, he mounted his new 1.5-inch microscope eyepiece to the lens of his enormous view camera with its accordion-like body fully extended. On January 15, 1880, Wilson Bentley took his first photograph of a snowflake. Mesmerized by the beauty of the result, he transported his equipment to the unheated wooden shed behind the farmhouse and began recording his work in two separate sets of notebooks \u2014 one filled with sketches and dedicated to refining his artistic photomicroscopy; the other filled with weather data, carefully monitoring the conditions under which various snowflakes were captured. <\/p>\n

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For forty-six winters to come, this slender quiet boy, enchanted by the wonders of nature and attentive to its minutest manifestations, would hold his breath over the microscope-camera station and take more than 5,000 photographs<\/a> of snow crystals \u2014 each a vanishing masterpiece with the delicacy of a flower and the mathematical precision of a honeycomb, a ghost of perfection melting onto the glass plate within seconds, a sublime metaphor for the ecstasy and impermanence of beauty, of life itself.<\/p>\n

WILHELMINA BARNS-GRAHAM<\/h5>\n

In 1948, well before she became one of Britain\u2019s most celebrated modernist artists, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham<\/strong> (June 8, 1912\u2013January 26, 2004) joined some friends on a trip to Swiss Alps. Wielding her pick-axe and rope, she climbed glacier after glacier, awed by the icy immensity, by an otherworldliness partway between the Romantic sublime and a Jules Verne novel. She returned home changed by the experience and began painting. For almost half a century, she didn\u2019t stop, abstracting the mysterious enchantment of glaciers in paintings both subtle and striking, almost mathematical yet full of feeling. <\/p>\n

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Blue Snout, Glacier Study<\/em>, 1951-1978. (Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust<\/a> .)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Glacier Embrace 3 (Evening)<\/em>, 1951-1986. (Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust<\/a> .)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Variation on a Theme (Suspended Ice)<\/em>, 1987. (Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust<\/a> .)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

She later reflected in a Tate exhibition catalogue:<\/p>\n

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The massive strength and size of the glaciers, the fantastic shapes, the contrast of solidity and transparency, the many reflected colours in strong light, the warmth of the sun melting and changing the forms, in a few days a thinness could become a hole, a hole a cut out shape losing a side, a piece could disintegrate and fall off, breaking the silence with a sharp crack and its echoes. It seemed to breathe!<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Glacier<\/em>, 1978. (Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust<\/a> .)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Glacier Field<\/em>, 1978. (Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust<\/a> .)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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[Untitled: Splintered Ice], 1993. (Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust<\/a> .)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Glacier Crystal, Grindelwald, 1950. (Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust<\/a> .)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Blue Glacier<\/em>, 1978. (Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust<\/a> .)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Glacier<\/em>, 1978. (Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust<\/a> .)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
RYOTA KAJITA<\/h5>\n

In his series Ice Formation<\/em><\/a>, Japanese-born, Alaska-based artist Ryota Kajita<\/a> photographs natural ice formations in the waters of Fairbanks, Alaska: otherworldly geometric patterns created by the bubbles that form as lake and river water freezes gradually from the surface down, trapping major greenhouse gasses like methane and carbon dioxide in the crystal lattice of ice. <\/p>\n

Beneath the artful depiction of the phenomenon may lie a scientific key to climate change \u2014 scientists in Alaska are studying the frozen bubbles to better understand global warming.<\/p>\n

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ERIK HOFFNER<\/h5>\n

For a quarter century, artist Erik Hoffner<\/a> has been capturing the dazzling crystalline skin that grows over the circular holes made by ice fishermen in his series Ice Visions<\/em><\/a> \u2014 images ambiguous and enchanting, reminiscent of Thomas Wright\u2019s 1750 pictorial theories of the universe<\/a>, of Rose-Lynn Fisher\u2019s photomicroscopy of tears<\/a>, of nebulae and craters and chrysanthemums, cellular and celestial at the same time, yet elementally earthly.<\/p>\n

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In a piece of prose that is itself an artwork, he writes:<\/p>\n

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Our world is wild by nature, destroying and creating anew in a process that may seem random but in practice is measured, methodical, and impressive. My inspiration stems from seeking out these wilds to understand and express their untamed nature, savage indifference, and orderly beauty.<\/p>\n

[The] series documents ephemeral formations created by ice fishermen in partnership with elemental forces. The holes that fishermen cut in a lake refreeze overnight, creating fertile ground for nature\u2019s wild artistic side. These perfectly augered circles become worlds at once interstellar and cellular: in the morning light, with tiny bubbles from below fixed almost magically in place among new inches of ice, these scenes come to life as eyes, galaxies, stars, or mitochondria when rendered in fine detail in black and white.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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MEGHANN RIEPENHOFF<\/h5>\n

Long ago, while visiting the photographic glass plates of nebulae and constellations at the Harvard College Observatory archives, I was overcome by the palpitations of paradox \u2014 how we think that photography immortalizes, while its very roots are in doing the opposite<\/a>: making of the ephemeral an illusion of the eternal, razing us on the edge of our own transience as we gasp at the beauty of long-dead flowers<\/a> and peer at the light of long-dead stars.<\/p>\n

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In her breathtaking project Ice<\/em><\/a>, artist Meghann Riepenhoff<\/a> both celebrates and subverts this paradox of temporality in her stunning cyanotype prints of ice formation, for which she spent four years wading into freezing waters all over this pale blue dot \u2014 from Walden Pond to the Seine to the mountain creeks of Western Washington\u2019s old-growth forests \u2014 to capture one of the most surreal facets of reality: the haunting alchemy of phase transition. <\/p>\n

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In this singular collaboration between human and landscape, she dragged blanket-sized sheets of photographic paper coated with potassium ferricyanide and ferric ammonium citrate \u2014 compounds sensitive to the blue portion of the spectrum spilling into ultraviolet, developed and fixed by only water and sunlight \u2014 to emerge with otherworldly images of crisp crystal lattices and feathery fractals: fluid becoming solid becoming wonder.<\/p>\n

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Radiating from her prints is a kind of magical realism \u2014 you peer at these freezing waters, this hallmark of our blue world, and see the atmospheres of other planets, the plumage of a bird from some undiscovered paradise, the hieroglyphics of some ancient civilization encoding elemental wisdom we have long forgotten. <\/p>\n

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At the heart of it all is a layered meditation on time and transformation, on the subtle dance between fluidity and solidity that may be the highest art of life, on how something, in becoming other, can become more fully itself.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
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Just before he formulated his revolutionary laws of planetary motion and just after completing the world\u2019s first work of science fiction, which landed his mother […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12339,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12338","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-purpose"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12338","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12338"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12338\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12339"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12338"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12338"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12338"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}