Nolan and Alan Moorehead flew to the American base at McMurdo Sound in mid-January 1964 as guests of Rear Admiral J.R. Reedy, Commander of the U.S. Navy Antarctic Support Force. 'Nolan took a box of watercolours and two hundred blank postcards to record his impressions during the helicopter tour of several research stations including the South Pole. The finished paintings are worked in oil mixed with an alkyd gel medium, instead of the usual linseed oil and turpentine. Sometimes Nolan employed the scraping back technique used previously with P.V.A.. In other passages the paint is as thick and ragged as the savage glacial landscape itself: repellent and absolutely inimical to man. Nolan remembers arriving with a "cliché idea" of the landscape as "rather a flat enormous paddock across which dogs would run"; haunted by the spirits of Shackleton, Scott, Bird and Mawson, of whom he had read as a boy. He found instead "a majestic kind of great continent ... [which] represented a reality stronger than oneself"' (J. Clark, Sidney Nolan, Landscapes & Legends, Cambridge 1987, pp.147-8).
Nolan's Antarctic paintings were exhibited by Marlborough in New York and London in 1965 with reprises of the Kelly and Burke and Wills series. As Alan Moorehead underlined in his introduction to the exhibition catalogue, Nolan had found a remarkable parallel to his Central Australian landscapes and explorers in the Antarctic: 'In the Antarctic and in much of Central Australia one finds the similarity of great extremes. Both are dry deserts, the one of ice and the other of rock and sand ... In the cold, as in the heat, there is a rejection of all changes and growth, even of life itself, and it is frightening ... Anyone wishing to paint or describe these scenes turns naturally to the explorers. They were the first on the scene, they had the fresh eye, they suffered the first shock of contact. Knowing nothing of what lay before them, being without maps or records of any kind, they had the advantage of unprejudiced minds ... The problem of the artist who now follows in the explorers' tracks is to get back to their state of innocence. ... They go there in defiance of nature, and what they see there bears no clear relation even to their inherited or instinctive knowledge. They meet the bizarre in colour and form and light, and if they are not afraid or overwhelmed they will accept what they see and not try to translate it into anything else. This is why Sidney Nolan's paintings are so satisfying to anyone who has some acquaintance with the desert and the ice - or more specifically, with man's place in the environment where he is rejected. The polar explorer is an embattled figure with staring goggled eyes and a swirl of protective covering round his head and body ... .' (Sidney Nolan, Recent Work (exhibition catalogue), Marlborough Fine Art, May 1965, pp.4-6)
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