In 2015 the London New Bond store Louis Vuitton commissioned the Ireland-based artist Blaise Drummond to curate a book of some of his favorite works for their world travel series. He chose to vision the fascinating Arctic.
The Louis Vuitton Travel Book collection commissions young and established artists to discover new destinations to offer a contemporary vision of travel. Drummond’s minimalistic landscapes from the Arctic represent a relationship, or the comparative grandiosity, depending on one’s interpretation, between the form of nature and the opposing force of humanity.
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4000 photos depicting fascinating Arctic
Blaise Drummond is known for his precise works, often a mixture of watercolor, collage, ink and acrylic. Drummond spent three weeks hiking and kayaking in the Arctic, taking 4000 photos depicting glaciers, mountains, hikers, cabins, and Arctic animals, which he later used as a basis for his paintings for the book.
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Preparing for the book
Preparing for the book he went on a ship into a fjord and suddenly he was on icebergs walking around there nobody else had been. He spent three weeks there hiking and kayaking in the Arctic. For him it looked totally unreal, like polystyrene. He photographed and it still didn’t look real. “The icebergs are like cities,” he said, “but they change every day.”
The illustrations in this book displays both delicacy and ingenuity.
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About Blaise Drummond
Blaise Drummond was born to Irish parents in Liverpool in 1967 and studied Philosophy and Classical Art at the University of Edinburgh before attending the National College of Art and Design in Dublin for a BA in Fine Art Painting and the History of Art. In 1998 he graduated with an MA in Fine Art Painting from the Chelsea College of Art and Design in London.
He has had numerous exhibitions in galleries around the world and a number of museum shows dedicated to his work, including the Kunstmuseen Krefeld, Germany in 2009 and Musée de l’Abbaye Sainte-Croix, France in 2006.
The Fascinating Arctic Through the Eyes of Blaise Drummond, written by Tor Kjolberg