Iceland Journal

Sketch of the sculpture Solfar (Sun Voyager) by David Collier.

Hamilton-based cartoonist David Collier is the creator of the acclaimed Collier’s series and Just the Facts, both published by Drawn & Quarterly. Collier is attending the NINE Comics Festival exhibition at the Reykjavik Art Museum in Reykjavik, Iceland. What follows are his written and sketched impressions of that trip.

Day 2

Solfar, Jon Gunnar Arnason's sculpture of a stylized Viking ship, keeps drawing me back to a spot just outside of Reykjavik's Old Harbour.

And I'm not the only one. Yesterday, as I drew the gleaming metal structure, a young woman in red socks sat motionless in front of it for the better part of an hour, oblivious to the -3° C cool. She finally stood up and took off when a creep in a knitted, ear-flapped tuque came along and boldly started snapping her picture. When she rose, I saw that she was taller than a shrimpy six-foot-one European guy like me. Though not as pronounced as in the Netherlands, they’ve got the tall thing going on in Iceland, a good indication to me that something is going right in a society. (I'm not sure how Canadians measure up, but I read recently that as a whole, Americans are now shrinking in comparison with Europeans.)

Solfar didn't always draw this kind of crowd. Thorbjorg Br. Gunnarsdottir, curator and collection manager at the Reykjavik Art Museum, later told me that during the artist's lifetime, the sculpture existed only as a small, obscure, tabletop model, not the ship-sized challenge to the mountains opposite the harbour that stands defiantly today.

But that's the way it goes in sculpture. A woman named Marley, a friend of my dad's from high school in Windsor, Ont., (“the doctor's daughter,” as my grandfather referred to her), went on to a life different from anyone we knew in Southwestern Ontario when she became the sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi's secretary. As a kid, I’d visit Sir Eduardo’s studio in London near the end of King’s Road, where in the ’70s all the punk rock stuff was starting up – an epicenter for my teenaged imagination! I was surprised at how the smallest, most inconsequential expression could end up as the largest finished work.

Despite sharing some aspects of her name with Jon Gunnar Arnason, Solfar's late artist, Ms. Gunnarsdottir betrayed no trace of being a relation. A lot of people in Iceland share the same name. Gunnarsdottir translates into “daughter of Gunnar.” (Similarly, a boy would have the name Gunnarsson.) To an outsider, it seems as if there's a shortage of last names in Iceland. To keep straight who's who, the phone book lists people's occupation as well as their names and addresses.

There's a lot of excitement around the Reykjavik Art Museum, as today's the afternoon when the big show, NINE - Comics by the Harbour, is due to open. The exhibition is supposed to be ready for the public by 4:00, but the last time I checked in at the gallery, I wondered how in God's name they were going to do it. The scene in the cavernous building (it was constructed in the 1930s and originally housed storage space for the Port of Reykjavik), resembles a disorganized chaos more than any gallery show I've ever been to.

But that, I am told, is the Icelandic way.

The guy behind NINE - Comics by the Harbour, Bjarni Hinriksson, was born in 1963 – the same year I was. But I doubt if I have the maturity to do what he's trying to pull off. Even in this age of e-mail, bringing artists from something like six different countries together is no laughing matter. And even if I did pull off a show like this, I doubt if I could muster Bjarni's sang-froid. "It's the Icelandic way," says Bjarni of the chaos. "Letting things slide until the last minute and then everyone pulling together and putting in an incredible effort and getting it done."

We've been hearing about this "Icelandic way” right from the get-go. The bedding in our hotel, for starters, seemed so skimpy – a light duvet thrown over a fitted mattress cover – that Jen felt prompted to question the management about it. The woman from the front desk looked at our minimalist sleeping arrangement and shrugged. "It's the Icelandic way," she said. So we tried it the Icelandic way. And we slept like babes, all of us.