Wave: Land’s End Study II. Cape Denison, Antarctica. ©Alasdair McGregor. Gouache on paper, 52 x 38cm.

Imagine being commissioned to paint en plein air at the world’s windiest location recorded at sea level.

Meet my friend and shipboard colleague Alasdair McGregor. If Alasdair wasn’t such a nice guy, he could be really irritating. That’s because he can rightfully  lay claim to not one but several creative talents.

Alasdair began his working life as a professionally trained architect but has devoted years to writing and painting, esteemed in both regards. Alasdair has written numerous books: you name it: natural history, architecture and design, biography, great explorers. With my own Antarctic background, one of my faves is his brilliant biography Frank Hurley: A Photographer’s Life.

As a writer and visual artist, Alasdair has spent significant creative time in Antarctica. In the 1980s he took part in a mountaineering expedition to sub-Antarctic Heard Island. In the late 1990s he was artist and photographer for two expeditions to Mawson’s Huts at Cape Denison in Commonwealth Bay, recorded as the windiest place on earth at sea level. Alasdair’s painting, Wave: Land’s End Study II, comes from his Commonwealth Bay experience. Here is what he has to say about it.

Spending seven weeks in early 1998 camped on the ice at Cape Denison was an immense physical and artistic challenge for me. For a plein air artist, it was not just the cold, but the ferocious winds for which this stretch of Antarctic coast is justly infamous that had me apprehensive from the start. But I need not have worried. There were fine and calm moments every few days and I made the most of them. I was particularly fascinated by the spectacular ice cliffs that stretched away to the horizon to the east and west of the tiny cape. The cliffs were the physical, and in many ways, the psychological limits of our existence. So near and yet untouchable, I would venture to what Mawson’s expedition dubbed Land’s End and John O’Groats to paint the cliffs in all lights and at all times of day. To me they the essence of frozen motion and this is what I sought to capture in my work.

Learn more about Alasdair and his wonderful creations at