The Flora S.
Nickerson in the Labrador Sea
1982 -
Etching and Aquatint
16 X 23 Inches (Plate Size)
His Father Dreams
1985 -
Etching and Aquatint
36 X 24 inches (Plate Size)
Daybreak, the
Labrador Sea
Etching and Aquatint
16 X 20 inches (Plate Size)
David Blackwood states: “A
few years ago I came across a 19th Century engraving of a ‘strange
occurrence on the Labrador’, a whale’s fluke sticking out of an
iceberg. That planted the idea of this etching and reminded me of
stories brought home to Wesleyville by the Labrador fishermen. One
such story had an elephant, with hair and tusks, described as a
‘great big monster’. This was probably an ancient mastodon, which
crossed over the Bering Sea thousands of years ago.
When
there was ‘not a breeze blowing’, a dead calm, on a Sunday
excursions were often taken to get a good look at a particularly
large and awesome berg. The Wesleyville schooners, all 63 of them,
carried a trap motor boat on deck, or towed behind, that would be
used to tow the schooners, to make headway when there was no wind
(rare). The schooners had no engines.”
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I made my
first voyage down on the Labrador with my father when I was six
years old, aboard our family’s schooner the Flora S. Nickerson.
I remember the experience vividly; in particular the mingled
feelings of anticipation, excitement, and awe which the wild
vastness of the place inspired in me. It is a landscape both
mysterious and starkly simple; a region of tremendous, even surreal,
contrasts of atmosphere, light and character. Its strange, bleak
beauty carries an undercurrent of danger; an undefined threat which
seems to lurk just below the surface. Moving through it, men and
their ships are dwarfed by mountains of ice and by the immensity of
the forces of nature that shaped them. One gets a sense that powers
as old as Creation move through this watery dreamscape, and that the
whales who spectacularly breach and sound into its black depths are
somehow an embodiment of this sublime power. Since that first visit,
the Labrador Sea has been a locale I have returned to time and again
in my mind and in my work, and it continues to exert a tidal pull on
my imagination. This exhibition is a journey in progress, part of an
ongoing artistic exploration of a theme which I feel I have only
begun to scratch the surface of.
DAVID BLACKWOOD
Port Hope
2004
"Sam Kelloway
Dreams"
1983, archival artist's proof
10 x 20 inches
His Father Dreams
II: Labrador Days
1988 - Etching and Aquatint
15 X 36 Inches (Plate Size)
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