The Romantic Sublime

The concept of the sublime in art was conceived by Edmund Burke in the eighteenth century when he wrote A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful published in 1757.

Notions of the sublime are closely linked with the English Romanticism - artists and writers who were concerned with humankind’s relationship to, and reverence for the natural world; in particular those works of painting or poetry that celebrate the majesty and overwhelming power of the natural world. Paintings like Turner’s Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth - with lashing waves and whipping storm clouds, clearly articulate Nature’s majestic and terrifying power.

The term sublime refers to art that has the ability to terrify or overwhelm the viewer. Burke asserts that the feelings of the sublime are triggered by extremes – vastness, extreme height, difficulty, darkness or excessive light.

Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.

If one witnesses an extreme or terrifying situation and survives, one is then free to experience delight - a ship battling through a violent storm, traversing a precipitous mountain ridge, stumbling through a pitch black forest and finding, at last, a road. The tension between terror and relief is the source of Burke’s sublime feeling - a delight in surviving terror. This is especially the case in art where we become, in a sense, voyeurs of terror; the viewer understands that the terrifying scene they are witnessing is not real and is therefore free to feel a delicious frisson of fear at the idea of being there.

One could make an argument that this is the same mechanism for feeling that is engendered when watching a horror movie, for surely the enjoyment comes only when we are able to tell ourselves it is only a movie:

Shortly after the death of our Mother, my sister and I went to the cinema to watch The Blair Witch Project. The film works on the deception that we are watching real events recorded by the victims on a camcorder as they get lost and terrified in the backwoods. I only mention my mothers death to explain why my sister had no idea that the story was not real: in our grief we had become quite reclusive for some weeks - absorbed by our sadness for our missing mother. She had not read reviews, not seen any media - she approached it cold. As we left the cinema she turned to me, ashen faced and said: ‘that wasn’t real was it?
She had not enjoyed herself at all.

George Stubbs (1724-1806) repeatedly painted an image of a Lion attacking a horse. Seventeen to be precise. My favourite employs powerful chiaroscuro lighting so that the central figures seem to be lit by a powerful spotlight; glowing in a terrible, violent and wild night of savagery. This image hung - above the piano - on the wall of my childhood home, and, reading a little of what Burke has to say, I now understand my fascination with it as a child: I was experiencing Burke’s Sublime feeling - a voyeur into an awful and unnatural attack, gaudily lit as if it were in a circus or some such spectacle.

Perhaps, viewing this image though a child’s eyes I was all the more compelled by it; maybe in a child’s mind, the normally clear distinction between reality and make-believe is more fuzzy than in the rational adult, so as to have amplified the compelling feelings of Burke’s sublime? Regardless, the stark opposition in expressions - the clearly terrified horse and the almost cartoonish malevolence of the lion sets up high drama so often repeated in literature and film; the terroriser and the victim, noble pure power reduced to mortal terror. No wonder this image lodged itself firmly in my unconscious, ready to creep its way back to the surface when the right conditions arrived. It has now become like a kind of psychic talisman - a fulcrum point that helps to inform the atmosphere I hope to convey in the photographs I take.

When I began to take photographs of the forest after nightfall I felt and hoped that the resultant images had some kind of feeling-effect that was transmitted to the viewer. I used the term reverence when thinking about the images. It was only when a friend spoke of the Romantics’ preoccupation with the sublime that I began to understand that it was the very same feeling that I was attempting to capture with my photography. In fact if I had to define reverence I may say that certainly there is fear involved. Fear and therefore deep respect for something vast and incomprehensible: A tree’s ability to manifest and grow, the synthesis of the forest, the amazing fact of existence of the natural world - or indeed that anything exists at all, for surely it would be more expedient to have a universe of absolute zero? Vast, infinite, unimpeded power; the universe and all its manifestations - down to the smallest twig - is indeed sublime.