Landscape resonates for me as an artist in a very elemental way. I’Äôm looking for moments when form, line, color and movement intensify and another reality might be revealed.
There is an improbable quality to the Icelandic landscape, a harsh and isolated realm, beyond conventional standards of beauty. Its magnificent mountain ranges and waterfalls, glaciers layered with volcanic ash, fluorescent green mosses, and bizarre rock formations give the landscape an other-worldly aspect. Iceland was for centuries the Ultima Thule, a land beyond the borders of the known world.
Traversing vast expanses, much of it with scant trace of human habitation, through a disorienting twenty-four hours of summer daylight, the visitor is quickly overtaken by a palpable sense that nature’Äôs most powerful and unrelenting forces have shaped this island. Almost every day brings (in no particular order) an unpredictable mixture of fog, rain, wind and snowy clouds racing across startlingly blue skies -- a photographer’Äôs nightmare.
But here is a landscape that is alive with meaning and a sense of place animated by historic as well as mythic events that are real and ever-present to Icelanders. Whether it is roads that have been re-directed to avoid elf habitats or the little changed remote locales described in Icelandic sagas of the 13th century, landscape here has a significance that is timeless -- at once part of the present and the historic past.
As it straddles the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, Iceland is quite literally being torn in half at the rate of an inch per year with lava rising to fill the gap. The visual drama of this landscape emerges from this tension between beauty and violence. I hope my photographs reveal some of the geological, cultural and mythic associations of this landscape that has affected me so deeply.
Michael Marston
mmarston@nycap.rr.com
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