11/10/2015 Artists in the Antarctic - Pacific Standard

http://www.psmag.com/nature-and-technology/national-science-foundation-sending-artists-to-the-antarctic-polar-expedition 1/7

When Lily Simonson packed her bags for a three­month National Science Foundation deployment toAntarctica this past October, she was sure to take extra pairs of long underwear and plenty of warm socks.She also brought sketchbooks, charcoal, a hundred square feet of canvas, and 25 gallons of oil paint.

For years, the National Science Foundation has been sending professional creatives to the icy south in an attempt to promote understanding of the

least-explored land on Earth. Is it working?

When Lily Simonson packed her bags for a three-month National Science Foundation deployment to Antarctica this

past October, she was sure to take extra pairs of long underwear and plenty of warm socks. She also brought

sketchbooks, charcoal, a hundred square feet of canvas, and 25 gallons of oil paint.

Simonson, who is, at press time, wrapping up her tour on the continent, is the most recent participant in the NSF’s

Antarctic Artists and Writers Program

Antarctic Artists and Writers Program

Antarctic Artists and Writers Program

Antarctic Artists and Writers Program

Antarctic Artists and Writers Program

Antarctic Artists and Writers Program

Antarctic Artists and Writers ProgramAntarctic Artists and Writers Program. For decades, this program has been sending professional creatives—poets,

illustrators, sculptors, filmmakers, and musicians—to the icy south in an attempt to promote understanding of the

least-explored land on Earth. Simonson, a Los Angeles-based painter, set out to make a study of biodiversity in the

frigid waters of the McMurdo Sound and beneath the permafrost of the McMurdo Dry Valleys.

Archibald McMurdo, the British naval officer who served on the first ship to chart the area in 1841, was no doubt

pleased to see his name splashed all over the continental map. But when people say “McMurdo” here, they’re probably

talking about the main research station of the NSF-managed United States Antarctic Program

United States Antarctic Program

United States Antarctic Program

United States Antarctic Program

United States Antarctic Program

United States Antarctic Program

United States Antarctic ProgramUnited States Antarctic Program, which operates

scientific investigations and logistics in the region. Capable of hosting more than 1,200 people, the McMurdo complex

has many of the infrastructural and cultural features that you’d expect to find in a small city: power and water facilities,

a post office, a medical center, three bars, and a robust recreational program with yoga classes and movie screenings.

The past year has seen a flurry of activity on Tinder

Tinder

Tinder

Tinder

Tinder

Tinder

TinderTinder.

Artworks created alongside scientific investigations, and Simonson’s marine-life paintings inArtworks created alongside scientific investigations, and Simonson’s marine-life paintings in

particular, Thurber says, can help their audiences “appreciate environments that really are outparticular, Thurber says, can help their audiences “appreciate environments that really are out

of the reach of the vast majority of the world’s populace.”of the reach of the vast majority of the world’s populace.”

Given the beleaguered state of science in the American political sphere—particularly science dealing with climate

change, as so much polar research does—it seems surprising that the federal government is supporting artists in the

scientific milieu. But consider these artists as modern-day participants in a tradition dating to the earliest days of

Antarctic exploration, and it makes perfect sense.

In the first polar expeditions, as now, artists didn’t come along merely to indulge creative whims. Well into the 20th

century, the Antarctic continent was literally uncharted territory. Artists were needed not only to describe new

discoveries, but also to help generate interest in the journeys, which, as naval support diminished over the years,

became increasingly dependent on private funding. “By 1914,” writes historian Stephanie Barczewski in her book

Antarctic Destinies: Scott, Shackleton, and the Changing Face of Heroism

Antarctic Destinies: Scott, Shackleton, and the Changing Face of Heroism

Antarctic Destinies: Scott, Shackleton, and the Changing Face of Heroism

Antarctic Destinies: Scott, Shackleton, and the Changing Face of Heroism

Antarctic Destinies: Scott, Shackleton, and the Changing Face of Heroism

Antarctic Destinies: Scott, Shackleton, and the Changing Face of Heroism

Antarctic Destinies: Scott, Shackleton, and the Changing Face of HeroismAntarctic Destinies: Scott, Shackleton, and the Changing Face of Heroism, “it was recognized that visual images were a

necessary feature of the lecture tours that all explorers were forced to undertake to pay off their expeditions’ inevitable

debts.” These images included delicate watercolors by natural historian Edward Wilson and the now-iconic

photographs and films of Herbert Ponting and Frank Hurley.

There was also a sense in which early explorers turned to creative endeavors to keep sane over the long, dark winters,

and, Barczewski points out, as a “useful exercise in team-building.” Shackleton famously brought a printing press along

488

SHARES� � � �

Artists in the AntarcticArtists in the Antarctic

JILLIAN HINCHLIFFEJILLIAN HINCHLIFFE ·· FEB 24, 2015FEB 24, 2015� �

on the 1907-09 Nimrod expedition. Aurora Australis, bound in dismantled packing crates, became the first book

produced on the continent.

Research excursions in the following decades often included photographers, some of whose work is still being used

today. (Recent extraction of 3-D data from a cache of 1940s and ’50s aerial photos is allowing scientists to map long-

map long-

map long-

map long-

map long-

map long-

map long-map long-

term changes in the continent’s glaciers

term changes in the continent’s glaciers

term changes in the continent’s glaciers

term changes in the continent’s glaciers

term changes in the continent’s glaciers

term changes in the continent’s glaciers

term changes in the continent’s glaciersterm changes in the continent’s glaciers.) Occasionally, a poet or historian or visual artist would come along. But it

wasn’t until the 1980s, after years of campaigning by visionary NSF program manager Guy Guthridge, that the U.S.

Antarctic Artists and Writers Program took shape.

These days, the program sends one or two participants to the ice each year, not so much for documentary purposes as

for interpretive ones—to “translate” the work of the scientists to a broader audience, according to Peter West,

outreach and education program manager for the NSF’s Division of Polar Programs

Division of Polar Programs

Division of Polar Programs

Division of Polar Programs

Division of Polar Programs

Division of Polar Programs

Division of Polar ProgramsDivision of Polar Programs. To do so, applicants go through a

rigorous application process in which their proposals are committee-evaluated on the dual criteria of intellectual merit

and broader impact, just as NSF scientists’ are.

West is strenuous in his assertions that the program does not issue awards lightly. Despite his affable manner, one gets

the sense while speaking to him that he has a lot of experience fielding irate questions from skeptical politicians. For

one thing, hopeful participants must demonstrate that it is necessary—“not desirable, not advantageous, but necessary,”

he says—to conduct their projects in Antarctica. Nor does the program provide grants. “We support people on an in-

kind basis,” West maintains, “but no one receives any funding through the Artists and Writers Program.” This means

that artists are brought to Antarctica in the same planes that bring the scientists, housed on the same bases, and

provided with the same food and protective clothing, but that they don’t receive any money for their time, materials,

or creations. The real gift of the Artists and Writers Program is access.

Simonson has been fascinated by marine invertebrates since childhood. While other kids were drawing princesses and

cars, the young Lily was filling her sketchpads with lobsters. She went on to earn arts degrees from Berkeley and the

University of California-Los Angeles, where her painting focused, for the most part, on crustaceans and moths. Today,

her aesthetic attractions continue to run to the obscure.

Gretchen Hofmann

Gretchen Hofmann

Gretchen Hofmann

Gretchen Hofmann

Gretchen Hofmann

Gretchen Hofmann

Gretchen HofmannGretchen Hofmann, a marine biologist at the University of California-Santa Barbara who recently worked with Lily on

the ice, describes a scene from a dive graced by a pod of seals: “The dive master with her kept saying, ‘Lily, Lily, look at

the seals!’ and she kept saying, ‘No no no! Look at the sea squirts!’” (Sea squirts are tunicates, small, vaguely floral-

looking underwater creatures that spend their lives attached to rocks in clumps.) “She’s calibrated differently than a lot

of people,” Hofmann says.

But it would be a mistake to chalk these enthusiasms up to mere eccentricity. For one thing, Simonson is solid in her

science; she describes geological features and chemosynthesis among denizens of underwater methane seeps with

equal aplomb. And she’s no slouch when it comes to fieldwork. All of the specimens that she paints, she collects

herself. That Antarctic plunge with the sea squirts followed a harrowing certification procedure requiring over 50 dives

—many of them in a drysuit, an impermeable, insulating get-up that Simonson describes as “astronaut-like” and “a

sleeping bag with limbs,” and into and out of which she wriggled twice daily to complete 25 dives in her first few weeks

on the continent.

Once qualified, divers in the Antarctic are rewarded with the best visibility in the world and an eerie, dramatic

landscape. Under the ice, Simonson found herself enchanted by “the feathery quality of the platelet ice, the gold-

green-turquoise gradation in the sea ice created by the microalgae growing in it, the steep volcanic dropoffs of the sea

floor, and the huge glowing brine channels.” The ghostly marine landscapes, and the animals that inhabit them, have

given new direction to her work.

Simonson’s paintings are a bit uncanny, with the luminous and sometimes grotesque quality of old Dutch still lifes.

They’re also very large, representing in mural-sized canvases creatures that are often no bigger than a few inches. She

uses this intensely magnified scale to emphasize her subjects’ weird and unsettling, yet inviting, qualities. “These

organisms that seem sort of alien-like and are thriving in extreme habitats where it seems like organisms shouldn’t be

able to thrive—there’s something otherworldly about them,” she says. “But then, by making them sort of human-sized

... I’m highlighting the ways in which they’re kindred.”

In some ways, painting in Antarctica is just like painting anywhere else. Simonson has access to a small studio at

McMurdo, not far from the rooms where the specimens are stored. She keeps a cooler with her so that she can take

some of the more robust creatures that she’s collected back to her workspace.

On the other hand, painting in Antarctica can be really hard. Outside, Simonson’s paints are only workable for 20

minutes before freezing. Sometimes, the wind sweeps the color off of her palette as soon as she loads it on. Wilson,

over a century ago, would be able to relate to these circumstances; like Simonson, he wound up making sketches on

site and taking notes on which colors to use when he returned to base camp. At least Simonson doesn’t have to dose

her eyes with liquid cocaine, as Wilson did nightly, Barczewski says, to soothe his snow blindness.

In some sense, Simonson’s work here recapitulates that undertaken by the earliest explorers, and she readily

acknowledges the influence that historical scientific illustration has had on her work. At the same time, the presence

of newer, nimbler technologies better suited to capturing scientific information frees her from purely descriptive

responsibilities. “I get to occupy a different space,” Simonson says. “I don’t just have to document the appearance and

the morphology of the animal. I can bring something emotive to it and also bring something kinetic to it.” Those

qualities are evident in her paintings, which seem to glow and float before the eye as something seen underwater.

It’s clear that Simonson’s voyage to the Antarctic—her second, actually, but her first with the Artists and Writers

Program—has been a boon to her artwork. But is it mutual? Can scientists benefit from an artist in their midst?

Andrew Thurber

Andrew Thurber

Andrew Thurber

Andrew Thurber

Andrew Thurber

Andrew Thurber

Andrew ThurberAndrew Thurber, an ocean ecologist at Oregon State University who has worked with Simonson and numerous other

artists in the course of his research, thinks so. Artworks created alongside scientific investigations, and Simonson’s

marine-life paintings in particular, he says, can help their audiences “appreciate environments that really are out of the

reach of the vast majority of the world’s populace.” An appreciation that, in turn, serves another good. “The deep sea is

an area that, if we can do anything to increase its visibility and increase people’s appreciation for it, it really benefits

the globe,” Thurber says, “because it becomes an environment that people want to conserve.”

BYBY JILLIAN HINCHLIFFEJILLIAN HINCHLIFFE

Website

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Simonson balks at drawing out the political aspects of her work. But they’re hard to avoid in any work of art. Even the

Dutch still lifes, those feasts for the eye, are loaded with symbolism—in effect, she says, they’re a “Calvinist warning

against excess.” Similarly, Simonson remarks of her deep-sea and Antarctic subjects that “these are both areas that are

really remote and that are becoming affected by human activity, and the changes are results of the excesses of the first

world.” While she’s careful to point out that her work isn’t intended to be didactic, Simonson, like other Antarctic

artists before her, can get people to care about things that scientific reports aren’t always able to.

Simonson is finding her latest inspiration in the tiny sea snails called pteropods. For Gretchen Hofmann, who

researches these animals, the attention that Simonson’s work can focus on them is vitally important. Hofmann

laughingly acknowledges that her fauna of choice lack the charisma of penguins or seals when it comes to generating

public interest. Like Thurber, she is quick to credit Simonson’s paintings with flourishing where words and diagrams

sometimes fail. “It’s where art is so critical to science, Hofmann says. “She’s able to capture an essential component of

why we’re doing this.”

Lead photo: Lily Simonson, Garwood Ice Cliff Antarctica No. 2. 2014. 72" x 90", oil, acrylic, and UV reactive pigment on

canvas. (Photo: Courtesy Jay Oligny and CB1 Gallery)

*UPDATE — February 24, 2015UPDATE — February 24, 2015: The photograph of the tiny pteropod Clione antarctica, the subject of Lily Simonson's latest

paintings, was originally attributed to Simonson. It was taken by Rob Robbins.

488

Photo Credit: Peter Rejcek

Artist Lily Simonson

sketches in the

McMurdo Dry

Valleys in

Antarctica. While

her interests are

usually in small

marine organisms,

Simonson

also sketched

landscapes during

her deployment

under the NSF’s

Antarctic Artists and

Writers Program.

All creatures great and smallArtist Lily Simonson joins scientists in Antarctica to paint critters larger than life

By Peter Rejcek, Antarctic Sun EditorPosted June 29, 2015

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The story of how an L.A. artist ended up scuba diving under the sea ice in Antarctica begins with lobsters.

Lily Simonson, even as a child, was fascinated with lobsters. Yes, even those held hostage in grocery

store aquariums.

“I always made drawings from the time I was a little kid,” explains Simonson, an exhibited painter who spent

more than three months in Antarctica diving and hiking across its varied seascapes and landscapes as

part of the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program.

“I was always into natural illustration,” she adds during an interview at McMurdo Station where she had

also set up an ad hoc studio to paint when not doing fieldwork.

Eventually, as her artistic career took shape in college, she found a new obsession – moths. Their frenzied

behavior and lack of self-preservation seemed to parallel human hysteria, she explains. And they had a

furry quality to them that she also appreciated.

Moths and lobsters: The two couldn’t seem further apart, except as seen through the lens of an artist. And

then Mother Nature – and some intrepid scientists – nudged Simonson in a new direction, a moment she

refers to now as “transformative.” Several friends sent her messages regarding a news article about the

discovery of a deep-sea dwelling critter called a yeti crab.

The article described the creature as akin to a lobster but with the fur of a moth. “I became instantly

fascinated by it,” Simonson says.

So much so that she flew to Paris to meet the yeti crab in person – and eventually got to know Danièle

Guinot, one of the researchers behind the discovery.

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Photo Credit: Alasdair Turner

Lily Simonson collects acritter, which she collected

while scuba diving inAntarctica, out of the McMurdoStation Crary Lab touch tank

to sketch.

Photo Credit: Peter Rejcek

Lily Simonson, right, prepares for herfirst dive in McMurdo Sound with diver

Rob Robbins.

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“We were totally kindred spirits, and I started to see all of these parallels

between art and science,” Simonson says. “One of the many parallels of art

and science is to observe external phenomena and make sense of it.”

The yeti crab lives a bizarre existence near fissures in the seafloor from

where geothermally heated water vents. The ecosystem is so far removed

from the sun that the foundation of its food web revolves around

chemosynthetic organisms that get their energy from chemical reactions

rather than photosynthesis.

The metaphors that lived on her supersized canvases of moths and other

invertebrates seemed less interesting than the backstory of the yeti crab.

“This stuff is so much weirder than I can impose on what I’m painting. Truth

really is stranger than fiction,” she notes.

Simonson had no science background. She holds an MFA from UCLA and a

BA from UC Berkeley. But that didn’t deter her from pursuing this budding

interest to explore the intersection of art and science.

Eventually, her collaborations with scientists would move out of the

studio and lab and into the field, where she accompanies

researchers on expeditions to see firsthand where the discoveries

are made. One of her first trips was on the research vessel Melville,

which was studying deep-sea fauna.

Every day, deep sediment cores and trawls along the seafloor would

bring up a menagerie of bizarre invertebrates. Each day Simonson

would use some of the muddy sediment as her paint and a wall of

the ship van on the deck as canvas to draw one of the animals that

were brought onboard, from polychaete worms to octopi.

“I really loved fieldwork and helping with fieldwork,” she says. “When you’re in the trenches of science and

discovery, I think it makes the paintings that I then make a lot more interesting. I get a richer understanding

of what’s being studied and how it’s being studied.”

The yeti crab and its newly discovered cousins would eventually play a key role in getting her interested in

altogether different fieldwork. A young scientist named Andrew Thurber had discovered a species of yeti

crab that seemed to “dance” around hydrothermal vents near Costa Rica.

When Simonson contacted Thurber, he told her about the primary focus of his research at the time –

invertebrates in Antarctica – and the stunning marine world that exists below the sea ice. He invited her to

come and see it for herself, as well as told her about the existence of the NSF Artists and Writers Program,

a highly competitive but unfunded fellowship that supports the arts by allowing a select few to work on the

Ice each year.

“The idea hooked me in,” she says.

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1/4/2015 Moment of Friday: Hagfish hanky-panky, Lily Simonson's oceanic obsession - LA Times

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/miranda/la-et-cam-moment-of-friday-painter-lily-simonsons-oceanic-explorations-20140911-column.html 1/4

Culture: High & LowWith Carolina A. Miranda

Moment of Friday: Hagfish hanky-panky, Lily

Simonson's oceanic obsession

SEPTEMBER 19, 2014, 5:21 PM

Carolina A. Miranda

LOS ANGELES TIMES

carolina.miranda @latimes.com

For her show at CB1 Gallery in Los Angeles, Lily Simonson is displaying plein air landscapes she painted while inAntarctica, such as this image of the Garwood Ice Cliff. It was her interest in ocean life that took her to the area on ascientific expedition last year. (Lily Simonson / CB1 Gallery)

1/4/2015 Moment of Friday: Hagfish hanky-panky, Lily Simonson's oceanic obsession - LA Times

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/miranda/la-et-cam-moment-of-friday-painter-lily-simonsons-oceanic-explorations-20140911-column.html 2/4

Step into the main exhibition hall at CB1 Gallery in downtown Los Angeles and you willsee a series of stark, practically Martian landscapes illuminated by blacklight. Thesepaintings, however, do not depict alien worlds. They are a series of works produced by

L.A.-based artist Lily Simonson during a sojourn she made to the McMurdo Dry Valleys inAntarctica last year.

To produce the paintings, Simonson spent almost a month in a tent, outfitted in three sets of longunderwear and a pair of wind pants.

"It was in the 20s," she says of the temperature. "Which isn't that cold. There are sites that go to 50or 100 degrees below zero in winter. But I was there in the height of summer."

It may not have been cold as far as Antarctica goes, but it was still pretty darn cold — especiallyconsidering that Simonson was painting outdoors. "I don't like using photographs, which is why Igo into the field," says the artist. "It all started with me going to labs to see specimens."

The specimens she means are sea creatures. Simonson is an artist with a bit of an oceanicobsession. More than half a dozen years ago, she was making paintings of mammoth lobster. Thenshe turned her attention to the furry Yeti crab, which somehow manages to exist alongside hot andgassy hydrothermal vents. For a painter, she is surprisingly knowledgeable about Antarctic benthicworms.

"I'm drawn to life in extreme environments like the vents," says Simonson, "places where it seemscounterintuitive for life to thrive."

Her quest for specimens to paint has taken her around the world in search of new sources ofinspiration for her oversized, hyper-real still lifes and landscapes.

A couple of years back, she worked on an exploration vessel run by the Scripps Institution ofOceanography, where she assisted a research crew studying clams and worms. During the journey,she also created temporary paintings on the side of the ship using ocean sediment.

Last year, she was in Antartica, a place to which she will return under the auspices of the NationalScience Foundation, to make more painted works.

But this week she's floating off the coast of Grenada on the "E/V Nautilus," an exploration vesselloaded with scientists studying life on the flanks of the underwater volcano Kick'em Jenny. (I spoketo Simonson last week, before she took off for the Gulf of Mexico.)

The Nautilus sends down a submersible Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) to the depths of theocean floor to shoot video and retrieve specimens. It also maintains an online feed of its

1/4/2015 Moment of Friday: Hagfish hanky-panky, Lily Simonson's oceanic obsession - LA Times

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/miranda/la-et-cam-moment-of-friday-painter-lily-simonsons-oceanic-explorations-20140911-column.html 3/4

Copyright © 2015, Los Angeles Times

underwater proceedings. And it is geekily riveting, offering live views of underwater research sites,along with plenty of scientist chit-chat.

Which brings me to Moment of Friday...

For her pick, Simonson chose one of the Nautilus' highlight reels (embedded in this post), whichthe crew regularly posts to YouTube. It consists of the exploration of a brine pool, an underwaterlake that is three to five times saltier than the ocean around it.

"I love those brine pools," says Simonson. "It's so uncanny. A body of water within a body of water.It's pretty surreal."

The scientist banter makes the video even better, offering a play-by-play of what's happening oncamera. This includes discussions about bacteria-eating snails and the slimy qualities of hagfish(not to mention images of hagfish hanky-panky). Also in the narration are observations like, “It’slike you’re going in the water but you’re already in the water.”

"There's something really incredible about it," says Simonson. "I'd never seen such high-resolutionfootage of sea life. I like to keep it on in my studio when I'm working. It's kind of like being there."

There is indeed something pretty hypnotic about it, and of the idea that in this day and age, thereare still worlds that remain unexplored.

Lily Simonson, "On Ice," will be on view through Oct. 26 at CB1 Gallery, 207 W. 5th St.,

downtown Los Angeles, cb1gallery.com.

Find me on Twitter @cmonstah.