The Sublime

What Caspar David Friedrich found at the end of the earth, I found in Vogue. That same terrified wonder that he found in natural beauty, I felt before natural beauty of an entirely different sort. His towering, mountain passes became my towering stiletto heels. 

Humorous, though the comparison may be, I truly do see a precedent, for this piece, in the romanticism of the turn of the nineteenth century. Romanticism was a reaction against a variety of, then ongoing, evolutions in European civilization. It is mostly understood as a rejection of enlightenment values. The romanticists didn’t so much disapprove of science as they did of the concept of absolute truth. Indeed, by championing the individual experience, one could argue that they laid some groundwork for the modern approach to life. I digress.

My work is not a rejection of the status quo — in many ways it is the status quo. It is the status quo under fire. Indeed, romanticism was also a nostalgic response to a changing cultural landscape — even more so to a physical landscape, succumbing to European industrialization. England may never have been quite as tranquilly pastoral as Constable’s paintings suggested, but it certainly had more natural beauty, prior to the Industrial Revolution. The romanticists longed for those deceptively simple times. Rugged alpine passes and expansive seascapes were, therefore, so sublime, because these natural wonders revealed the fragility of human life, and contextualized the insignificance of human construction.

Sexy hasn’t been forgotten — Timberlake brought it back, remember? Rather, it — or this extreme, airbrushed version of it — has become a symbol of oppression, to be denounced. I don’t yearn for the misogynistic days of Mad Men any more than people like Brontë did for the brutality of pre-modern Britain. In two different ways, we both, simply, long for a beauty that never quite existed. That longing is what those halftone dots are supposed to provoke. They merely tease at a beauty that is at once so proximately near, and so existentially far. The idea is that, in real life, it would hang at the far end of a long enough room. Entering opposite, one would be drawn towards the beauty on offer, only to find it fading progressively as one neared. The halftone screen acts as an impassible barrier between viewer and object.

There is another layer to the effect. The dots are, like the image they create, borrowed from magazines. Visual culture is what has ultimately constructed the unobtainable, yet endlessly compelling fantasy of beauty that I show here.

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This portrait was more technically challenging than I anticipated, but really, it’s taken me this long just to discover what I was trying to say. When emotions come into the picture, I often feel lost, and struggle to decipher their meaning. Anyway, I chose this image, of Anna Jagodzinska, cropped from one of Tom Ford’s eyewear campaigns, because it is certainly sublime. (If there is man who understands sex and the sublime, it is Tom Ford.) Of course, the images to not accurately depict the sublimity which I encounter in real life, but I believe that their bold, frontal presentation, and indifferent (if not slightly contemptuous) expression better stimulate the sensation than any personal candid ever could.

This piece is actually the prototype for two others on which I am working. This one was created by a very peculiar technique which is actually a negative halftone. If you look closely, you will see that the dots are white, and it is the screen which is coloured. While this sacrificed some colour accuracy, it has produced a crispness which I have yet to match with the traditional halftone method. In fact,  the unusual process has given the model a plastic quality which only furthers her ideality. Like the two pieces still in production, this one measures 30"x40" and will be printed. I originally considered painting it, before deciding that that medium added nothing (other than technical frustration). This version was completed January 9, 2014.