B e h i n d The Lens SEPTEMBER, 13 - OCTOBER, 11
WAVERLEY LIBRARY
32-48 DENISON ST, BONDI JUNCTION NSW 2022
R ichard DOBBI E
“NORTH and SOUTH - POLES APART”
Concept & Design ArtCelerator www.artcelerator.com.au
Copyright - Behind The Lens Exhibition 2017 Richard Dobbie
Richard Dobbie About the artist Rick is an ex-Australian Army Officer with a passion for adventure travel and photography. After leaving the Australian Defence Force Rick started his own business SAFAR, “Journey” conducting Leadership and Teamwork Development programs and workshops internationally. This led to setting up and leading facilitated experiential journeys to Antarctica, the Arctic, Africa, the Amazon and throughout South East Asia. An Art Student before joining the Army Rick has come full circle combining his passion for adventure travel, personal development, exploration and photography. Rick’s journeys on the pathways, rivers and seas less travelled have afforded many opportunities to see and photograph the rare and unusual. From polar bears hunting and orcas frolicking in the Arctic to lions hunting in Africa, colourful flowers and scenes from across South East Asia, to penguins marching in Antarctica. Through the auspices of his company SAFAR, Rick leads small groups on adventure travel journeys exploring leadership and teamwork and the world at large - “journeys for the journeys within” and of course the opportunity to capture this special world in a photograph.
^ Kayakers from the Hilltop “We need the tonic of wildness ... at the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us. We can never have enough of nature.” - Henry David Thoreau 40cm X 30cm Framed $275.00 Mounted Only $75.00 Print Only $50.00
> Angry Cousin Oliver, Deception Island “They are extraordinarily like children, these little people of the Antarctic world, either like children, or like old men, full of their own importance and late for dinner, in their black tail-coats and white shirt-fronts — and rather portly withal.” - Cherry-Garrard
NORTH and SOUTH POLES APART This collection is a suite of photographs taken on a number of trips north and south to the Arctic and Antarctic. Polar exploration has long been an interest of mine but nothing prepares you for the sheer beauty and majesty of the polar regions. They may be “poles apart” and singularly diverse in wildlife but they share in common great extremes of climate and weather – the Antarctic is the coldest, windiest, driest and highest region on earth whilst the Arctic is similarly extreme with just
the sparsest of human occupation. Above all for an artist/photographer is the magic and majesty of the ice. Icebergs and glaciers forged and sculptured over thousands of years into grand and magnificent formations and structures. These photographs I hope capture just some of the beauty and diversity of these special regions that few of us are privileged to see firsthand. I hope they encourage others to travel north and south to experience these awe inspiring and wonderful works of nature.
Maurice, Mayor of Eisberg 52cm x 35cm Framed $300.00 Mounted Only $100.00 Print Only $75.00
“They are extraordinarily like children, these little people of the Antarctic world, either like children, or like old men, full of their own importance and late for dinner, in their black tail-coats and white shirt-fronts — and rather portly withal.” - Cherry-Garrard
Location, Location, Location - Penguins with a View
52cm x 35cm Framed $300.00 Mounted Only $100.00 Print Only $75.00
The real estate agents’ mantra – property that sells quickly and for the highest price because it provides sweeping panoramic views of the ocean. ’Not far from the ski slopes as well! “Hidden in the glorious wildness like unmined gold.” - John Muir
Professor Penguin 40cm X 30cm Framed $275.00 Mounted Only $75.00 Print Only $50.00
The absent-minded professor is a talented academic whose focus is on hypothetical fish matters and this leads him often to forget his surroundings. Engrossed in his “own world” he frequently fails to keep track of what is going on around him, obsessed in his research in increasing krill production in the Southern Ocean.
Crowd on Salisbury Plain
Magdalena Fjord, Svalbad
There are up to 500,000 raucous but friendly King penguins in the colony here on Salisbury Plain, a broad coastal plain on the north coast of South Georgia in the South Atlantic Ocean. The birds, the light and the backdrop all stunning.
Magdalena Fjorden is on the west coast of Spitsbergen, the largest island in the Svalbard archipelago. A whaling station was once established here. The remains of four blubber ovens or furnaces have been found on Gravneset, as well as a graveyard containing about 130 graves dating from the 17th to the late 18th centuries.
40cm X 30cm Framed $275.00 Mounted Only $75.00 Print Only $50.00
Icicles on Iceberg, Paradise Bay
Wedding Cake Ice Cliffs
“Art is but nature better rendered” Unknown.
Massive blocks of ice tower over a group of kayakers and seemingly hang in the air above them.
Icicles formed by freezing water as it drips from an iceberg gradually been worn down by wind and sea forming a curtain of sparkling glass spines – nature as art. The birds, the light and the backdrop all stunning.
“Huge blocks of ice, weighing many tons, were lifted into the air and tossed aside as other masses rose beneath them.” - Earnest Shackleton, “South!”
Where’s Winston Just some of the hundreds, thousands or more King penguins gathered en masse doing a variety of amusing things and making a boisterous din as they go about their excited business. Many are young brown fluffy adolescents squawking at and along with their parents. Viewers are challenged to find Winston who we meet elsewhere hidden somewhere in the group.
52cm x 35cm Framed $300.00 Mounted Only $100.00 Print Only $75.00
Icing on the Christening Cake Like the eccentric cubist creation of some giant cake decorator the sheer scale of this ice formation is overwhelming. “She had never known that ice could take on so many shades of blue: sharp lines of indigo like the deepest sea, aquamarine shadows, even the glint of blue-green where the sun struck just so.” - Malinda Lo, “Huntress” “If Antarctica were music it would be Mozart. Art and it would be Michelangelo. Literature and it would be Shakespeare. And yet it is something even greater; the only place on earth that is still as it should be. May we never tame it.” - Andrew Denton
Winston’s Grandfather Archibald
Winston Takes a Bow
This is Winston’s paternal Grandfather, Archibald. At first he comes across as a gruff and aloof older gentleman. He often waddles about muttering under his breath scowling and annoyed at almost everything but especially at the noisy and boisterous behaviour of the brown furry fledglings. He is particularly grumpy if he doesn’t catch fish several times a day. Underneath this brusque and impatient exterior though is a kind and generous grandparent with a sentimental side, a soft heart beneath his waistcoat.
Winston, our hero. A veteran vaudevillian, Winston is likely to break into dance at the drop of a hat. His happy feet tripping the light fantastic and not being a shy Aptenodytes Patagonicus he willingly takes a bow in response to enthusiastic audience applause.
52cm x 35cm Framed $300.00 Mounted Only $100.00 Print Only $75.00
Sea Ice in Front of Converging Glaciers 52cm x 35cm Framed $300.00 Mounted Only $100.00 Print Only $75.00
Great rivers of ice making their way slowly but ever surely to the sea, glaciers sculpt mountains and carve valleys and continue to flow and shape the landscape. They are prominent in the polar regions and create great massifs of ice that are constantly moving, heaving and groaning. “We were helpless intruders in a strange world, our lives dependent upon the play of grim elementary forces that made a mock of our puny efforts.” - Ernest Shackleton, “South!”
Fishing Party
40cm X 30cm Framed $275.00 Mounted Only $75.00 Print Only $50.00 This small penguin fishing party spent some time walking up and down the edge of the ice peering intently into the water. Ice and snow covered mountains behind them. Their diet consists mainly of krill, but they also eat fish and squid.
‘Bergs, Blocks and Peaks “Antarctica has this mythic weight. It resides in the collective unconscious of so many people, and it makes this huge impact, just like outer space. It’s like going to the moon.” - Jon Krakauer
“... there’s a silent voice in the wilderness that we hear only when no one else is around. When you go far, far beyond, out across the nether lands of the known, the din of human static slowly fades away, over and out.” - Rob Schultheis
52cm x 35cm Framed $300.00 Mounted Only $100.00 Print Only $75.00
Day at the Beach
Ice Column, Arctic Ocean
King Penguins taking in a day at the beach on Salisbury Plain, South Georgia some enjoying a swim or a surf, others strolling along the shoreline. No swimsuits, beach umbrellas, surf or boogie boards required. They may be birds that cannot fly but they are the most graceful and nimble of swimmers.
This monolith seemingly rises straight out of the ocean but is in fact standing on a solid bed of submerged ice, the megalith column a remnant of a decaying but once gigantic iceberg. It was estimated to be in excess of twenty stories high and could be seen at great distance.
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