Black Ice

Painted with tar and titanium white oil paint, Black Ice exchanges the traditional pristine whiteness of glaciers and icebergs for industrial tar’s lustrous, metallic blacks and polluted tonal browns. The medium’s glossy character creates a reflective surface that mimics the glistening of ice while simultaneously alluding to its decay.  

The melting effect is enhanced through intricate dripping patterns and pooled areas, evoking disintegration of the polar ice caps, the consequent rising sea levels, the impact globe-spanning industrialization is having, and the broader consequences of our disconnect from the natural world.

For me, the beautiful yet almost oppressive quality of the medium adds an existential element to the work. Smaller pieces encased in antique frames recall a time when 19th century artists celebrated the natural world and its apparently endless abundance. The more somber tones here allude to the importance of what icebergs tell us now — while conveying the same wonder that artists like Frederic Edwin Church and William Bradford felt at their incredible structural beauty.

“Volpe’s glaciers and ice bergs are not frozen—they’re remembering. Tar sinks like history. Oil breathes like weather. What appears still is actually moving, slowly, insistently, the way truth does. This is not landscape. It’s a state of being— adrift between collapse and grace…. A meditation on isolation, climate, and the quiet power of ice.” - Georges Berges, GB Gallery, NYC

UPDATE 2026: I’m currently in the process of exploring residencies in Newfoundland to see and sketch the ice firsthand in collaboration with filmmaker Joel Gardener. We are looking at several artist-in-residence programs and science and research centers located on the east coast of Newfoundland - the same region from which Frederic Church famously painted studies for his blockbuster 1861 painting, The Icebergs.