Antártida (Antarctica)

Written by Cristina Santa Cruz

ETERNAS AUDIOGUIDE Antártida (Antarctica) (Spanish version)Cristina Santa Cruz

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Antártida (Antarctica)

Jorman

Oil on canvas

140 x 140 cm (approximately 55 × 55 in)

2025

Collection: Eternas

Category: Portrait · Imagination · Geography

Not all faces burn. Some shine through ice.

Not all landscapes are meant to be walked.

Some are contemplated in silence…

as if one were listening to an ancestral secret.

There are portraits that look at us. And there are portraits that hold us.

This woman with frost-kissed hair is neither queen nor goddess: she is a continent. She is Antarctica made flesh. The frozen mother of the sublime. The living skin of a land that cannot be possessed—only honoured.

Jorman portrays her with a still, monumental wisdom—almost inhuman—yet so deeply earthly she could well be the grandmother of time. Her hands, resting together upon her lap like calved ice held in calm, seem to bear centuries of silence, covenant, and endurance.

White here is not merely white: it is suspended light.

Blue is not simply blue: it is consciousness.

The chosen palette does not chill—it illuminates from within.

Each fold of her cloak echoes the folds of the land.Each silver strand of hair is a storm of wisdom that never needs to raise its voice.

Jorman does not paint a landscape—he compels it to gaze back. And in doing so, he urges us to ask ourselves what we feel before the sublime, what place we inhabit in the face of that which we cannot command, and whether we are truly capable of protecting what surpasses us—in time, in scale, in silence.

“Nothing can be more wonderful than this part of the world. It is the stage where nature still appears greater than man. Here, time freezes, and one is reminded how fleeting our history is when set against the centuries of ice.”

Cristina Santa Cruz

Abril 2025

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Antártida (Antarctica) in context

Antarctica is a continent without nation, without ownership, without weapons, without cities. And yet, it has existed in the human imagination longer than many countries on the map.

For over 120 years, Argentina has maintained an uninterrupted presence there, sustaining science, community, and care. Orcadas Base, founded on February 22, 1904, was the first permanent scientific station on the continent. Since then, it has become an extended homeland, a sensitive frontier, a solemn commitment. This painting is also a tribute to that presence—to the men and women who faced the white solitude with both flag and devotion.

But Antarctica is not only politics or climate: it is also myth.

There journeyed Edgar Allan Poe, in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, where he imagined a fissure in the ice descending toward the inexplicable.

There followed Jules Verne, in The Sphinx of the Ice Fields, seeking to give form to the disquiet stirred by eternal frost.

There descended Lovecraft, in At the Mountains of Madness, describing ancient cities buried beneath the ice—witnesses to civilizations older than human memory.

Jorman embraces that legacy, yet he does not render it with monsters or shipwrecks, but through a woman of steadfast and noble gaze, who needs not recount her story—for her presence alone is enough.

Among the great adventurers who traversed the southern seas, Charles Darwin—who never set foot on the Antarctic continent itself, yet sailed through the sub-Antarctic regions of southern South America and recorded his impressions in The Voyage of the Beagle, published in 1839—wrote with deep emotion about the landscapes, the climate, the extreme life forms in these austral latitudes, and the glaciers, which he described in awe as “the most magnificent spectacle that nature has ever produced.”

Some years later, Thomas and Lucas Bridges, witnesses of the world’s end and guardians of its memory, documented the lives and culture of the Selk’nam, the original inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego—Earth’s final threshold before the White Continent. Thomas, an Anglican missionary and linguist, was the first European to learn and record the Yámana language. In the mid-nineteenth century, alongside his wife Mary, he founded the Ushuaia Mission, in a region then marked on maps as “the uttermost part of the earth.” There they raised their son, Lucas Bridges, who inherited not only the language of the native peoples, but also their deep reverence for the land, its rhythms, and its spirit.

In The Uttermost Part of the Earth (published in 1948), Lucas Bridges recounts, with intensity, tenderness, and clarity, a journey that was not one of conquest nor of colonisation—it was one of coexistence, of listening, of learning.

The Selk’nam people possessed a memory trained to an almost unimaginable degree. Their traditions were oral, and yet they remembered details spanning entire generations—mythologies, customs—preserving them intact through time. With his portrait of Antarctica, Jorman seems to give a face to that memory: not as a dead archive, but as a living force that continues to speak to us from the vast white South.

The Bridges family lived among unforgiving winters, endless skies, sacred rituals, and endangered tongues. They witnessed births and deaths, observed the migration of guanacos, the songs of birds, the dances of the Hain ritual in which spirits took form. And they recorded everything—not through the lens of conquest, but through that of the humble observer—in that Tierra del Fuego, land of legend. But a legend made real, whose story deserved to be told before all was lost.

In that urgency to tell the story before the essential is lost lies the very reason Eternas was painted, the reason poetry is written, or expeditions into the unknown are undertaken. What drives the ice-bound explorer, the storyteller, the artist, and the scientist is the same impulse: to preserve, to revere, and to leave a legacy.

These native peoples believed the elements were living beings, that the wind had a name, that the ice remembered.The woman painted by Jorman could well be their most ancient goddess.Or perhaps their most recent witness.

Her posture also evokes the great explorers of art—those who travel without vessel, armed only with brushes and spirit. Much like the Selk’nam in their Hain rituals, where men would dress as spirits so that children might learn the mysteries of the adult world, this painting, too, wears the guise of a portrait to teach us that landscapes have soul. And name. And face.

And perhaps in this silent portrait of Antarctica, this woman of ice is also an embodiment of all that the Bridges family sought to preserve: a white guardian of stories that still await to be heard—before the frost covers all.

Antarctica is the only continent entirely devoted to peace and science. It is the frozen mirror where humanity sees itself beyond borders. In her presence pulses both a warning and a promise: that beauty and fragility may coexist, but only if we choose to protect them.

Like this woman.

Like this painting.

Cristina Santa Cruz

April 2025

Antártida (Antarctica), by Jorman · Oil on canvas · 140 x 140 cm (55 x 55 in) · 2025 · Eternas Collection

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