24" x 24"
oil on panel
Despite the reduction, this image recalls Romantic landscapes, which has led me to the word "sublime". A Wikipedia entry regarding the sublime in art has expressed my intentions rather succinctly (I have cut and pasted parts of it below).
An artistic reference to this piece is Arthur Dove, a painter who embraced the sublime.
Wikipedia entry
Victor Hugo touched on aspects of the sublime in both nature and man in many of his poems (Poems of Victor Hugo). In his preface to Cromwell (play) he defined the sublime as a combination of the grotesque and beautiful as opposed to the classical ideal of perfection.
The experience of the sublime involves a self-forgetfulness where personal fear is replaced by a sense of well-being and security when confronted with an object exhibiting superior might, and is similar to the experience of the tragic. The "tragic consciousness" is the capacity to gain an exalted state of consciousness from the realization of the unavoidable suffering destined for all men and that there are oppositions in life that can never be resolved, most notably that of the "forgiving generosity of deity" subsumed to "inexorable fate".[15]Victor Hugo touched on aspects of the sublime in both nature and man in many of his poems (Poems of Victor Hugo). In his preface to Cromwell (play) he defined the sublime as a combination of the grotesque and beautiful as opposed to the classical ideal of perfection.
The sublime, as a theme in aesthetics, was the founding move of the Modernist period. Attempting to replace the beautiful with the release of the perceiver from the constraints of the human condition, these ideas were amplified in critical theory through the work of Jean-François Lyotard[16]. For Lyotard, the sublime's significance is in the way it points to an aporia in human reason; it expresses the edge of our conceptual powers and reveals the multiplicity and instability of the postmodern world.
