Frank Hurley Painting

This painting is inspired by voyage of the SS Endurance, an astonishing tale of adventure and survival by Sir Ernest Shackleton and his crew in the frozen water and land of Antarctica. It is a painting series that celebrates fortitude, hope and endurance in the face of life's challenges. Not only was Frank Hurley a brilliant photographer who made many technical innovations in his career, he was also an industrious man with keen abilities for survival in treacherous conditions. Hurley was a skilled tinsmith and made a water pump for the lifeboats of the Endurance. After the Endurance had sunk, Hurley took materials salvaged from the wreckage and made a portable stove that was taken around from camp to camp for cooking. This kind of engineering was no small task, especially since there were no adequate or sharp tools for the job. In Hurley’s time, a camera was a large awkward box, weighing many pounds. The camera was accompanied by more wooden boxes of glass plates that were used to take negatives. Even shooting a simple photograph was quite an undertaking, and Frank Hurley regularly hauled his own equipment, which at times could weigh up to 40 pounds. Hurley was known to ascend—with his gear in tow—to very difficult and dangerous places, like up the masts of the Endurance or up the glacial mountains of South Georgia. Lionel Greenstreet, first officer of the Endurance crew, said that Frank Hurley was “a warrior with his camera & would go anywhere or do anything to get a picture.” Instead of a traditional portrait, I wanted to represent Hurley with a subject he loved to photograph: icebergs. “…at 10am we entered long leads of ice-free water in which were drifting some fine bergs of magnificent forms. One, a fine cuniformed mass, 200 feet high, I photographed.” -Hurley’s diary December 21, 1914

Painting:Oil on Canvas

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:20 W x 16 H x 2 D in

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