i don't mean to keep flappin my gums about art and everything, but i came across this picture online and immediately, Haunted Beach popped into my mind. There is something so eerie about this picture, yet elegant and whimsical....what do you guys think??
Chelsea,
ReplyDeleteIn no way are you "flappin [your] gums" about art---I love blogs that address something that isn't a poem or a novel.
On another note, I don't see "The Haunted Beach" here. I'm not saying that it isn't here---I just don't see it.
Though the first line of the poem, "Upon a lonely desart Beach," can clearly be applied to this image, I think that many of the others are missing: "the white foam"; "the green billows"; "Sea Birds"; "the haunted hut"; even the "Summer Ocean" itself. Where are these?
Is your image, however, still a Romantic one? Personally, I think that it is, and my attempt at proving this, I maintain, is going to be awful (so don't say that I didn't forewarn you).
The fog certainly reminds me of Caspar David Friedrich's "Wanderer above the Sea of Fog," for in both paintings the fog confers an aura of mystery, (perhaps) an aura of the sublime---even this landscape is too much for a human to comprehend, it says.
The difference between the two images, the drastic difference, at least, is in the focalization: there is a subject in Friedrich's painting, a focal point, whereas there your image lacks one.
I am reminded of the Romantic definition that I raised today in class, the idea that Romanticism is "the shift from the objective to the subjective."
In "Sea of Fog," being as we are focalized through the subject, the painting clearly suggests the Romanticism of subjectivity. Does your image, without a present subject, do this? Perhaps it does. Perhaps we, as the viewers, are acting out the subjective. And herein lies another advantage: whereas in Friedrich's painting, our landscape is possibly filtered through the eyes of our subject, in your's, there is no mediator between the landscape and our own eyes---in other words, we don't get a filtered image.
Just some thoughts.