Half Back

ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO TODAY...

Scott's party made it back to the base at Cape Evans, after being marooned for a day on a small island while a blizzard blew through.

After the meal we struck camp, formed marching order, and started half running for winter quarters. Covering a couple of miles we found, to our great relief, that the fast ice not only extended up to the Cape but right round into North Bay, We soon sighted the hut, and shortly after saw some people working outside.

Directly they saw us in they ran to bring the others out at full speed, and coming to meet us they cheered and greeted us, then hauled our sledges in. It appeared they were unable to recognise any of us owing to our dirty and dishevelled state.

This was not to be wondered at, for we had not washed nor had we shaved for eighty days. We all talked hard and exchanged news. Ponting lined us up to be photographed―the first nine Bolshevists―we looked such awful black­guards.

~ Teddy Evans

L-R: Griff Taylor, Silas Wright, Teddy Evans, Birdie Bowers, Capt. Scott, Frank Debenham, Tryggve Gran, Edgar Evans, Tom Crean

Several of the party went quite 'dotty', Gran grabbing a piece of pastry as soon as he got inside, and Griff excuting a perfect pas-de-seul up the passage-way.

~ Frank Debenham

Meanwhile, back at Hut Point ...

We were very anxious about the returning party, especially when all the ice north of Hut Point went out. The blizzard blew itself out this morning, and it was a great change to see White Island and The Bluff once more. Atkinson came in before lunch and told me that, looking from the Heights, the ice from Glacier Tongue to Cape Evans appeared to have gone out. This sobered our lunch. We all made our way to Second Crater afterwards, and found the ice from the Hutton Cliffs to Glacier Tongue and thence to Cape Evans was still in.

Before leaving, Scott arranged to give Véry Lights at 10 p.m. from Cape Evans on the first clear night of the next three. To-night is the third, and the first clear night. We were out punctually, and then as we watched a flare blazed up, followed by quite a firework display. We all went wild with excitement—knowing that all was well. Meares ran in and soaked some awning with paraffin, and we lifted it as an answering flare and threw it into the air again and again, until it was burning in little bits all over the snow. The relief was great.

~ Apsley Cherry-Garrard

You can find Scott's account of the return journey as well as the photos Ponting took of the 'Bolshevists' here.

40 Days of Art: Styles

As you develop as an artist, you tend to get drawn to certain artists who have gone before you, whose style you really connect with. Often people will ape someone else's style for a while, others just pick up influences. This is OK! It's how you learn. Humans are an imitative species – we learn by copying what others do – and copying of the work of masters who have gone before used to be a core part of a young artist's training. Our modern world is so obsessed with originality and individual expression that this aspect of artistic education has more or less disappeared, but that doesn't mean its educational value has. By all means, copy others' art, so long as you don't claim it as your own. Learn as much from it as you can!

The important thing is to keep moving on; don't identify with one artist alone for your whole life but move from artist to artist, picking up what you can from each of them. Gather enough influences and the pot will become so muddied the individual ingredients will be less apparent, and might recombine themselves in unexpected ways which might even appear new. Congratulations! You have arrived at your own personal style. Everyone's style is an amalgamation of influences: if you think someone is completely original, it's probably because you haven't been exposed to their influences yet. Ideally, your style should keep evolving, as you add new influences to the pot.

Another reason to keep moving on is that if you learn everything you know from one person, you learn their flaws as well as their strengths. This is artistic inbreeding! In broadening the gene pool you learn strengths from other artists that might compensate for weaknesses in the first, but of course they come with their own weaknesses, which you compensate for by finding another artist, and so on. Even if you emulate someone widely considered to be one of the best, you will only match them by about 70%, because you do not have their life experience, influences, or even their specific arrangement of nerves and tendons that causes them to hold a pencil a certain way and make this kind of stroke instead of that.

If you think of the world as white light, different artists' styles are like different coloured filters on it. You can project the world through a red filter or a green one, but keep piling on more of the same filter and the light just gets darker. Combine the two, though, and you get yellow, which really isn't very much like either of them. If you combine all colours, of course, you get white, i.e. the entirety of the world, but reality can be so much more interesting with a splash of colour.