Romantic landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich contemplated nature by painting the subliminal forces of the surroundings and translating it into a two-dimensional painting. Read about artist’s experience of being in the sublime:
Transcription from interview with Leigh [09-10-2016], unedited:
“I feel overwhelmed and insignificant and I love that feeling. The more you interact with nature, the more you respect and the more you will acknowledge how climate will change a lot more. Being here makes me feel very present and small. Small in a good way though! It is so vast and I’m such a little speck. When we’re coming here in the zodiac, everybody looked like these little seals, or even ants. And we’re just travelling in such different boats, you know? But at the same time we all have impact. We keep talking about the sublime and I feel like I am in it. And there’s something timeless about it. That I feel like I am seeing something very similar to what the first explorers, the Inuit, saw. That it just hasn’t changed that much. Which is nice. This was one of the reasons for me to come here. I see it as impending disaster coming here. When I saw the sea caps see in Alaska it looked pristine. It looked like the water was clean and there wasn’t oil everywhere. But it was there, just beneath the surface. I think the impacts of that are still being felt. And when I was there I kept being told of all the things I would be able to see if I had been there two years ago. There used to be muscles lining the shore that you could eat for dinner every night. And there were sea otters that had breeding ground and now there are only 50. Compared to that experience I feel it is inevitable that a disaster will be here – there will be a shipwreck, there will be an oil spill, because people don’t take care. So I wanted to come here before that happens.”