Provenance:

Private Collection, Ontario.

Literature:

Gary Michael Dault, “Ice and Fire: An Interview with David Blackwood”, Black Ice: David Blackwood, Prints of Newfoundland, Toronto, 2011, page 37.

Michael Crummey, “Candles In The Dark”, Black Ice: David Blackwood, Prints of Newfoundland, Toronto, 2011, page 120.

Note:

Discussing two of David Blackwood’s most celebrated prints, Michael Crummey demonstrates that, “Blackwood has always set the human element in his art within that same looming scale, the ocean and headland and restless night… In “Loss of Flora S. Nickerson” and in “Fire Down on the Labrador”, the human disasters are happening in the wings, barely registering against the vastness of the North Atlantic and its creatures. I’ve always been struck by how often light is a peripheral presence in Blackwood’s best-known work, whether in the torches of sealers adrift in the cavernous winter night, the helpless ship ablaze in “Fire Down on the Labrador”, or the tangential gleam of sunrise or sunset just offstage in his many seascapes… The sheer scope and eerie beauty of the landscape he depicts inspire both wonder and dread in equal measure. The cumulative effect of his work is to make the history of settlement of this island – and all human endeavour beside it – seem impossibly fragile and fugitive. And heartbreakingly tenacious and honourable”.

In a 2010 interview with Gary Michael Dault, Blackwood noted the immense risk which fire presented at both land and sea, a grease fire in the gallery of a schooner a serious threat which could lead to a catastrophic destruction and abandoning of a ship in the unforgiving sea. “…And then you’d be facing the worst possible scenario, the thing that was the greatest fear of all – to be caught in the Labrador Sea all alone, and having to abandon… So in my print ‘Fire Down on the Labrador,’ it’s the ultimate disaster that I’m depicting – to be caught in that environment, and having to abandon ship.”