ZARIA FORMAN

CAPTURING THE BEAUTY OF POLAR ICE BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE

OVER THE last decade, Brooklyn artist Zaria Forman has become renowned for hyperrealistic drawings of water in dramatic transitions— waves crashing on the beach, rainstorms thrashing the sea, icebergs shimmering as they melt. There was only one problem: “At first, I was actually terrified to draw ice.” she says. “I didn’t think it was possible to render in my chosen medium.” That’s a valid concern, considering that Forman uses pastels, basically colored chalk. Today, though, she’s finished dozens of stunning images of glaciers, thanks to numerous trips to the polar regions.

It was her first trip to the Arctic, in 2007, that got her interested in the subject. Based in Greenland for a month, she ventured out into the ice fields each day, where the people she encountered—scientists, reporters, government officials—were already focused on how the landscape was changing. Vast fjords were not freezing as they once did, which impacted the locals’ subsistence hunting. “It opened my eyes to the climate crisis,” she says, “and it instilled in me a need to play a part in helping to solve it.”

It wasn’t until 2012, however, that Forman turned her creative energies back to ice. She returned to Greenland to lead an expedition honoring her recently deceased mother, an artist herself. “I decided it was time to face my fear,” she says, “and I’ve been drawing ice ever since.”

For her work, Forman spends at least a month on location, making sketches and taking thousands of photographs, before sitting down when she returns home to draw large-scale interpretations of the photos. The meticulous drawings can take upwards of five months to complete. That translates into a lot of time in the studio—and in the field. Forman has trekked on a glacier with a Greenlandic shaman, climbed through an ice cave in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, and flown with NASA scientists over areas of Antarctica where rescue would have been nearly impossible. She’s also been to the Maldives—the lowest, flattest country in the world, because melting ice leads to rising seas.

Forman wants her art—which has been displayed in museums, U.S. embassies, and NATO’S headquarters in Brussels—to help people connect emotionally to places that are on the front lines of climate change. “I choose to convey the beauty as opposed to the devastation of threatened places,” she says, “because I want to inspire the viewer into positive action, not paralyze them with fear.”