On its surface this is a Christmas painting, playful and absurd: a walrus and two penguins building a snowman on a frozen plain in Antarctica. The snow glows with lavender shadows, a scrap of seaweed crowns the snowman’s head like a Christmas hat, and the birds offer their small contributions with comic solemnity. The walrus presses its paw into the figure as if to steady it, or perhaps to confess something wordless into the body of ice.
Yet beneath the whimsy, there is a haunting echo. I painted this while listening to Unheilig’s Zeit Zu Gehen – on impossible repeat, a song that carries the strange weight of farewell, of leaving and yet remaining. And in that atmosphere, the scene became less about animals at play and more about a ritual of humanity itself – the impossible truce.
In December 1914, British and German soldiers climbed out of their trenches on Christmas Day. They exchanged gifts, sang carols, and in some places, played football in the mud of no man’s land. For a brief moment, the machinery of war was suspended by something older and stranger than the state: the human instinct to make snowmen, to laugh, to meet the eyes of the supposed enemy and see only a face.
The walrus and penguins here are stand-ins for us, for the absurdity of enemies who are not enemies, for the primal innocence that endures beneath slaughter. The snowman is our fragile monument, a figure raised against the cold. Its scrap-wood arms stretch like flags that will soon fall, its head already cracked by the weight of the green algae and sea urchin. It will not last, but it was built together.
Christmas has always been a paradox: joy wrapped in grief, birth shadowed by death, light framed by encroaching winter. In the trenches, as in this frozen scene, that paradox takes on flesh. A momentary ceasefire, a soccer ball kicked across the mud, a walrus shaping snow under a sky spangled with indifferent stars.
Art cannot preserve the truce, but it can remember it. And memory, even when painted in the guise of animals, is its own fragile peace.