This is a portion of a watermedia painting sent along with the Explorer's Club Flag to Assiaat, Greenland this week.
I have made a simple representational watercolor & acrylic painting on a roughly 4 ft by 9 ft watercolor paper (vertical) of 3 polar bears swimming.
They will be dropped into the seas of the Davis Strait and filmed as they sink below the waters to symbolize the peril that polar bears face.
Polar bears use ice floes as a station for hunting seals and belugas; as the ice floes disappear from climate change, polar must seek ice floes further and further away from their hunting grounds. Many drown while finding these-- the distances are becoming too too far.
I am offering painted "effigies" or polar bears sinking below arctic waters to substitute & "protect" actual polar bears who are in danger of drowning due to climate change's reduced ice floe coverage.
Today the Wanderbird sets sail from Aasiaat, Greenland in Disko Bay with my polar bear painting and several other projects of mine. She is on a mission to follow the 1869 expedition of Romantic painter/explorer William Bradford as he recorded Greenland's icebergs and glaciers for artistic use. See more about his voyage at the Clark Art Museum's online show http://www.clarkart.edu/exhibitions/bradford/content.cfm?id=1
and about our expedition at