Still today, artists labor to capture Arctic's brilliant light

ABOVE THE ARCTIC CIRCLE, CANADA - When I returned from a recent two-week trip to the Arctic, a lot of people asked me to describe the landscape.

I tried, but was somehow never able to give them the sound bite I wanted to deliver. The word "beautiful" hardly did it justice. Neither did "awesome" or "jaw-dropping," "glorious" or "breathtaking."

So when I went to see the new exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum called "To the Ends of the Earth, Painting the Polar Landscape," I was fascinated to see artists wrestling with the same kind of challenges.

The exhibition features 17 artists who journeyed to the Arctic and Antarctic in the 19th and 20th centuries to satisfy their muse. One of them was David Abbey Paige, a commercial artist who grew up in Fitchburg and managed to land a gig in 1933 as the official artist for explorer Richard Byrd's second expedition to the Antarctic.

One evening, we learn in the show, Byrd asked Paige to paint a particularly impressive twilight scene. Paige politely declined. "I could paint it, alright, but what's the use?" Paige replied, according to Byrd's diary. "Nobody would believe it. Whoever saw a sky like that? How can you describe a sea that's like no sea ever was or will be again?"

Exactly. It was in the cold, high latitudes I discovered that the alchemy between the landscape, the sea, the drifting ice, the silence, the light, the scale, and the desolation is so powerful and otherworldly that all one can say is: Nobody would believe it.

This doesn't stop artists from venturing toward the north and south poles even now, long after the golden age of polar exploration that inspired the earlier painters, and despite the expense and logistical difficulties of painting on a ship in sometimes turbulent seas and subzero temperatures (a problem cleverly solved by Paige, who worked in pastels, which don't freeze).

"It is so absolutely amazing to travel to where no other soul has been," says Linda Mackie, a Toronto painter and founding member of the international Polar Artists Group, a network of 50 artists passionate about polar landscapes. Mackie uses her art to focus public attention on climate change. "I had my fifth trip to the Arctic this summer, and it was the most emotional," she says.

I took my trip to the Canadian Arctic in September with about 80 other passengers - five of them artists - in a 12-day expedition on a converted Russian research vessel. We traveled to the heart of the Northwest Passage, prime whaler and explorer territory. English naval officer Sir John Franklin got stranded there, prompting rescue missions that met their own unhappy ends. American explorer and scientist Elisha Kent Kane battled the elements by lassoing giant icebergs to haul his 144-ton brig against the mighty surface current.

We visited Bylot Island in Davis Strait, depicted by Canadian painter Lawren S. Harris in a soul-stirring, sculptural painting in the Peabody Essex show; it was inspired by his 1930 trip on a government supply ship. We saw aquamarine icebergs so dazzling and vibrant they seemed to have been lit from within.

One brisk, sunny day we loaded into small rubber landing craft known as zodiacs and tooled around Croker Bay near Devon Island - the largest uninhabited island in the world - where the towering icebergs are so jagged and angular they could be products of Frank Gehry's imagination. Across from me sat Danielle O'Connor Akiyama, a Toronto painter, quietly taking it all in behind huge dark glasses.

The glasses, she told me later, were to mask tears. "The iceberg really ripped my soul," she said. "The light was so pure, so raw."

The light is magical in the far north. It has more clarity than the light we're accustomed to down here, more brilliance, because of the oblique angle at which it hits the earth, the absence of trees or buildings, the lack of pollutants, the abundance of land forms like pitched mountain ranges and icy glaciers with strangely reflective shapes. The light beckons many artists who like to experiment with shapes and shadows, who relish the challenge of painting colors in their purest form and the joy of being surprised by color when, say, a tiny purple saxifrage flower peeks through a landscape of uninterrupted snow.

"The light here gets right into my insides," said Toronto-area artist Pat Fairhead, 81, who was on her "eighth or ninth" trip to the Arctic. She had once hired a helicopter to get an aerial view of a glacier in Davis Strait. "I was as high as a bloody kite!" she says.

In the Arctic, even non-artists like myself can literally see the world in a new light. It's an exhilarating feeling, a little (I think) like being a polar explorer at a time when there are so few new places left to explore, when Google Maps can take you almost anywhere and even remote arctic outposts can be captured on a Webcam.

It's a chance to brush up against life at its most elemental, which stirs the imagination and brings out the artist in all of us. And it doesn't take much imagination to contemplate just how puny and vulnerable you are when you're in a tiny raft in the shadow of an iceberg that was once a morsel of a mammoth ice sheet.

It is humbling. It is - for want of that better word I've yet to find - beautiful. And it may be what prompted David Abbey Paige to tell Richard Byrd in the Antarctic that "nature puts her price on beauty."

"I've knocked around the world looking for things to paint," the artist said. "And I've found that you've got to go far - you've got to leave the beaten path to find beauty like this."