ANTARCTIC COLOURING 



water-colours and pastels to the south with him. He 

 found that the water-colours could not be used in the 

 open at all, for they froze at once. Oils could be used 

 fairly comfortably in the summer, though it was always 

 chilly work to sit still for any length of time; during 

 the spring the oils froze after they had been in the 

 open air for about an hour, so that steady work was 

 not possible. The pastels could always be used for 

 making " colour notes," and they were also used for 

 some of the colour-sketches that are reproduced in this 

 book. Mits had to be worn for all outside work, and 

 this made sketching difficult. 



Marston found, as other artists have found, that 

 Nature's color-schemes in the Antarctic are remarkably 

 crude, though often wondrously beautiful. Bright blues 

 and greens are seen in violent contrast with brilliant 

 reds, and an accurate record of the colours displayed 

 in a sunset, as seen over broken ice, would suggest to 

 many people an impressionistic poster of the kind seen 

 in the London streets. Words fail one in an attempt 

 to describe the wildly bizarre effects observed on daj^s 

 when the sky was fiery red and pale green, merging into 

 a deep blue overhead, and the snow-fields and rocks 

 showed violet, green and white under the light of the moon. 

 Marston used to delight in the " grey days," when 

 there was no direct sunlight and the snow all around 

 showed the most subtle tones of grey; there would be 

 no shadows anywhere, perhaps light drifts of snow would 

 be blowing about, and the whole scene became like 

 a frozen fairyland. The snow-bergs and snow-fields 

 were white under direct light, but any hollows showed 

 a vivid blue, deepening almost to black in the depths. 

 There was an unlimited amount of interesting work 

 for an artist, and Marston suffered to some extent, as 

 did the other speciahsts on the expedition, from the fact 



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