Fernando de Noronha
Three hundred miles off the northeast coast of Brazil is the miniature archipelago of Fernando de Noronha. Rising from the ocean floor 13,000 feet below sea level an underwater mountain emerges from a turquoise sea, culminating in a 1,060 foot high peak of rugged grey basalt rock surrounded by twenty-one small islands. When I decided to paint the miniature archipelago of Fernando de Noronha in Brazil, I was following in the footsteps of explorers from another time: men like Francis Drake, James Cook and Charles Darwin who visited the island, in the 16th, 18th and 19th centuries.
I visited the Natural History Museum to find out more about the island. Fernando de Noronha is the top of a dead volcano which rose up in the middle of the Atlantic shortly after the continents of Africa and South America drifted apart. Seen from a satellite, the structure shows the geological scars of a remote past. Around 90 million years ago, the island broke through the ocean surface, spewing lava and forming one of the highest points of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. The sea, infinitely blue and transparent, begins where the coast falls away in abrupt cliffs. These give Noronha its majesty. On the more protected leeward coast, they rise into sharp peaks, such as the Morro do Pico.
I learned that Thomas More, one of the greatest intellectuals of his time, was deeply moved by Americo Vespucci’s accounts of the lands of Brazil: ‘new and pure, unfolding before Europe.’,
Perhaps the setting for Atlantica, the island that inspired More to write his Utopia, was this ‘… semi-circle in the form of a crescent; and in the middle rises a rock visible from afar…’ Fernando de Noronha was ‘discovered’ in 1503 by Americo Vespucci, the Italian sailor who gave his name to the American continent.
These pictures are painted on sheets of Moulin de Larroque, a 300lb handmade paper which I prepared prior to the expedition by removing part of the surface and filling it with Jesmonite. I used paper rather than wooden panels as they were more portable travelling in Brazil. Temperatures were 35 degrees so I was using gum Arabic to slow the drying time of watercolour and increase the transparency for creating greater luminosity.
The light is similar to that of Cornwall, but the colours are very different because of its equatorial location. In Atlantic Emerald I have tried to capture the intensity of the green by using colour to make us acutely aware of the changes brought about by season, time and weather, that affect the appearance of the island and its surrounding atmosphere.
In the watercolour of the Two Brothers I am trying to capture the shimmering atmosphere around the crisp outline of one of the island’s most impressive features, exploring the borderland between abstraction and figuration.
Jeremy Gardiner
