His early years on the edge of the Arctic fired the imagination of the youth, and directed the course of his whole future life. While he was still a student he made a trip to England. “There,” he says, “an idea that had long been shaping itself in my brain took hold of me. The polar regions fascinated me. My forefathers, I knew, hunted bears at Spitzbergen; and as a boy I had heard all about the Arctic. I wanted to see and paint that wonderful country. Travelers would write that the Arctic nights were magnificent; but I wanted to give the colors and lights themselves.”
Borissoff Becomes a Samoyed
Borissoff shipped on a Russian boat from Newcastle for the Murman Coast—Russian territory adjoining Norway—and from there sailed to Nova Zembla. On the frozen island of the Arctic Sea, living among the wandering Samoyed tribes, he began to paint under such conditions as certainly no artist has ever painted before. It was the make-shift expedition of a buoyantly adventurous and rough-bred young artist, better furnished with canvases and brushes than with clothing, instruments, and stores. He practically became a Samoyed; he adapted himself to the tribal laws with good-natured tact, helping out the native commissariat by shooting white partridges, wild geese, and Arctic bear. He studied reindeer breeding; he took native baths in steam-tents and ice-water; 412 he attended weddings, funerals, and pagan rites. Wherever the tribe traveled, he followed; and everywhere he painted.
The movements of the Samoyed depend largely on the habits of the reindeer. “In autumn the reindeer seeks the wooded zone,” says Borissoff. “He cannot stand the tremendous snowstorms that whirl in the tundra; and he must live on lichen from the trunks and boughs of fir-trees, or feed on the shoots of birch and willows, when the frozen soil prevents him from browsing moss under the snow. But no sooner does he sniff the polar spring, than he longs irresistibly to gallop to the north to the open air of the Arctic, where there are no tiresome gnats, no intolerable wasps to lay their larvæ in his skin and cause him torment.”
The Samoyed keeps in this migrating animal’s wake; and it was in one of these migrations north that Borissoff first saw what he calls the Realms of Death.
Painting in a Temperature of 30° Below Zero
“The curious thing was that I found all as I had imagined it,” he says. “The knowledge of the icebergs and the snow seemed to have been born in me. Vast stretches of glaciers with their yawning chasms of death, icebergs mountain-high—I greeted them as old friends. Living on native rations and enduring the most bitter cold, I made landscapes—or rather, icescapes—in the open, with a temperature of 30 degrees below zero.
“Sometimes it was impossible to paint. Even the turpentine froze. The paint congealed in lumps, whilst the hairs of the brushes snapped off like brittle glass. I had to put on fur gloves to hold a brush, and work with swift, energetic strokes—as the rough appearance of some of my paintings bears evidence.”
All of Borissoff’s paintings were done in the ice zone beyond the 70th parallel of north latitude, in the district between Archangel and the Yalmal Peninsula. He never tires of telling of the peculiar color-tones of this region, and the curious psychological effects of its distance, silence, and isolation. Living amid its singular light phenomena, where the spring-time snow turns pink against blue icebergs, and the boggy midsummer tundra swims in a sea of orange-red against a sky of aquamarine, even the Samoyed becomes a color worshiper.
“Why does that man sit in a scarlet cloak on rose-colored snow against a solid background of dark blue?” I asked, examining one of Borissoff’s paintings.