POWYS artist David Bellamy’s latest book, ‘David Bellamy’s Arctic Light’, has just been awarded best outdoor book 2017 by the Outdoor Writers’ & Photographers’ Guild.
The product of many expeditions to the Scandinavian Arctic, the book is crammed with David’s sketches and watercolours of glaciers, mountains, icebergs, fjords, the Greenland ice-cap, Inuit settlements, huskies and Arctic wildlife and much more.
The judges Mark Whitley of Dalesman publications and Chris Bagshaw said: “In a marketplace seemingly full of ‘personal accounts’ of some journey or another, this book is singularly different, bringing a fascinating insight into the creative artistic process, and providing a readable, informative account of exploring one of the world’s wildest places.”
While David does a lot of travelling with his work as artist and author he is always pleased to get back to Powys after an expedition. “Powys is incredibly rich in magnificent landscape scenery for the artist to paint, but I do have to go a little further afield to find the odd iceberg and glacier. With their stunning colours and reflective qualities these vast ice features make truly exciting painting subjects.”
Some of the expeditions were based on dog-sledges to extremely remote locations, staying in rather basic hunters’ huts. Sketching from the moving sledge in deep snow could be almost dreamlike in the mountains, but out on the sea-ice while charging over hard ice ridges it was like trying to ride an old-fashioned road-drill. On one occasion while sketching the following sledge downhill at speed, David was suddenly thrown off the sledge, hit a snow-bank and bounced back onto the sledge still clutching his sketchbook and pencil.
David originally comes from Pembrokeshire and has written 18 books. His paintings can be seen in the Ardent Gallery in Brecon, and he has just ended a successful exhibition on the Arctic in Belgravia, London.