Blessed be the artist who keeps a logbook, full of her impressions of a Christian Women’s Association cruise in the Far North of Norway. Anna-Eva Bergman’s talent as a caricaturist finds literary form with her description of “a swarm of bosoms decorated with small or large gold or silver crosses, hanging from the end of a long chain.” Bergman also grumbles about the boat’s bad food and bad lodgings. But all these disappointments evaporate on June 28, 1950, when Bergman stands on deck and witnesses the Arctic phenomenon of the midnight sun for the first time.
“The mountains seem[ed] transparent, nothing had depth anymore,” she writes. “Everything was like a vision, a possibility not yet realized. If you want to paint this, you have to find the expression that suggests the atmosphere, the effect of the colors. Nothing naturalistic.”
