A full 2 hours of plein-air painting was a luxury afforded to me on this day. A small island was dedicated to this outing, where the stillness of this bay was overwhelming. Complete silence aside from the cracking and sloshing of ice floating all across the fjord. The focus towards the intense blue turquoise ice gives the only strong colour notes. The bluer the ice, the older and more compacted it is, as ice bubbles have slowly been squeezed out. Sometimes several hundreds of years separate the source and snout of such a glacier.

Fascinated by the natural world from an early age, Toby WRIGHT spent much of his early years drawing in Monaco’s oceanographic museum, where he also was inspired by paintings hanging on the walls from arctic expeditions from early 1900’s. In particular, the painter Louis Tinayre was an expedition painter for the explorer Prince Albert 1st of Monaco. Over 100 years later, Toby WRIGHT found himself drawing and painting in the same locations involved in awareness campaigns highlighting the precious nature of our polar regions. Since that time, he has pursued expedition painting into other extreme locations: Antarctic, Alps, Himalayas, to bring the experience of raw nature to a public far removed from it.