A new exhibit of Cordova artist David Rosenthal’s oil landscape canvases is coming to the Copper River Gallery of The Cordova Museum July 8 -Aug. 2, featuring the renowned painter’s work on “Painting Light at the Ends of the Earth.”
An artist’s reception for the exhibition is scheduled from 5-7 p.m. on July 11.
For Rosenthal, who has been painting in Cordova for nearly 50 years, “the paintings are the best possible way to get people to look at global warming.”
“As an artist I had no idea I was going to become a climate explainer,” he told The Cordova Times in an interview.
But that is, in fact, as much of a passion for Rosenthal as the fine art landscapes themselves.
Rosenthal’s overall body of work includes paintings of the Antarctic continent, Arctic regions, the Greenland Coast, the Greenland Icecap, Norway, Alaska, Alaska glaciers, Maine, New Hampshire, and the Southwest United States.
From his start as a painter back in Augusta, Maine, his paintings were all about his love of nature, and while he did take two semesters of art classes at the University of Maine in Farmington, “the bottom line is everything I learned about painting I didn’t learn from my classes,” he said.
To anyone looking at these or other exhibits of his work, Rosenthal said he hopes the chronicling of the retreat of glaciers and sea ice will be a reminder of the subject of global warming.
From the 1970s and shorter onward, he noticed that the world was getting warmer, with longer, hotter summers and shorter more mild winters.
“My evidence for a warming trend was anecdotal, based on my experience and stories I heard from people who had experiences from living in Maine years before I was born,” he wrote in a narrative for the Anchorage Museum exhibit.
In the late 70s he began living in Alaska, and soon after began traveling in the Arctic and in Antarctica, where he also found the same warming trends.
Scientists also long before had started to study the warming of the planet and associated rise in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse cases, and their conclusions were based on hard data.
The world has already reached a tipping point in many places, Rosenthal said, and the current warming has triggered events that he notes will accelerate the warming, with melting permafrost releasing millions of tons of greenhouse gases.
In his travels to record on canvas the changes in the glaciers, Rosenthal turned to doing watercolors for studies.
“When I was in Antarctica in the winter, I would do thousands of drawings and do five or six watercolors in the evening,” he said. “The watercolors were studies of the landscape I would choose from to decide what to paint full size. I also did a lot of studies in small oils; hundreds of them down in Antarctica.”
He said he feels that to first capture the image of a glacier landscape with a camera doesn’t work for him – because when you take a picture with a camera you get an image of one split second in time and one point is space, with the camera recording passively what it saw there.
“When I draw the world from minutes to hours I am drawing what I am seeing,” he said. “I am looking into the shadows, the light. I look at how I am affected by the mountains, balancing the lights and dark. I can paint the foreground the way I see it, the way it looks, and then I can look at the sky and paint it, not the way the camera can record it.”
This is the message he tries to pass on to his students, whether in informal workshops at the community college in Cordova or at the Anchorage Museum of History and Art.
“It is a start to get people looking at the world the way they see it,” he said.
Rosenthal emphasized the pillar of his art, which is action.
“I hope that anyone connecting my exhibit with the subject of global warming will remember we are all responsible, and will think about what changes we can make to slow the emission of greenhouse gases,” he wrote in his narrative on global warming. ” Everyone should be pushing our leaders to do something now to cut greenhouse gas emissions before it is too late to stop catastrophic warming.”
Rosenthal currently has an exhibit at the Anchorage Museum of History and Art, which will continue to run through Sept. 12.
The Cordova exhibit is to include some of his best past paintings, and some recent work that will be for sale.
