- Courtesy of the artist and Winston Wachter Gallery
- PEOPLE LOVE NEW GLACIERS This is a pastel drawing by Zaria Forman.
In response to the accelerating disappearance of arctic glaciers, artists have taken to making replacements. These sculptures, paintings, drawings, and photographs are an effort to steady the glacier population of the world, even if more and more of them have to be fake.
Zaria Forman is the latest practitioner, a 31-year-old living in Brooklyn who is highly talented at conjuring mesmeric scenes of turbulent water and sky in pastels. In pastel drawing, you hold the sticks and shards of color in your fingers; it’s a process that looks like finger painting, but Forman’s results are fastidiously precise. For the last nine months, she’s been making a series of large, majestic drawings of arctic glaciers and waves crashing on the coasts of the Maldives, the tiny, low-lying Asian island country that’s particularly vulnerable to rising sea levels—a canary in the climate-change coal mine.
From even a little distance, Forman’s drawings look like dramatic, high-contrast photographs of tempestuous water and sweaty mountains of ice the colors of blue slushy and gleaming-white toothpaste. It is not surprising that these romantic spectacles are flying off the walls into collectors’ homes. Ice is the new vanishing race.
