Caspar David Friedrich

And I'm surprised I haven't talked about his work before.

So I did talk about, um, the romance movement as an art, like, movement, um, when I was talking about Caspar David Friedrich.

And Caspar David Friedrich, I would argue, is, like, the German J.M.W. Turner to a certain extent because they both were landscape artists.

Um, but-

What about, what about those names, by the way? Sorry to interrupt, but great names.

No, no. J.M.W. Turner.

And Caspar was it-

Joseph- Caspar David Friedrich.

He's facing out towards an ocean.

It's shot by Annie Leibovitz, and it's a reference to Caspar David Friedrich's Wanderer above the Sea of Fog from 1818.

Is that a photo?

It's just a painting.

43.

Which famous artist made this artwork shown here? Is it Caspar David Friedrich, J.M.W.

Turner or John Constable? I correct if you said J.M.W.

Turner.

Definitely don't want any humans around in the landscape so that you can focus on all the perceptions and experiences that nature is causing you to feel.

This is the sort of popular idea of what romanticism was, wasn't it? It's the sort of ruined landscapes and the David pictures, Caspar Friedrich pictures.

Yeah.

The

It looks very strange for an eye who's never seen it before, and I was just very curious about that eye, and it also resembled something very existential.

It almost have that feeling of that romantic wanderer in a Caspar David Friedrich image or something.

Mm-hmm.

It's someone standing there and making a choice to jump or not to jump.

It has been the achievement of a few, often ignored artists of the modern period, to make a case for introversion, to try to coat solitude in glamour.

In a painting by the German artist Caspar David Friedrich, we're invited to trust that the lonely figure in the landscape is privy to insights that might be lost in the crowd down in the lowlands.

The man has needed to travel up to the mountains in order to put the bluster and envy of humans in perspective.

We should dare to follow him in his trajectory.

And that somehow there was this strange relationship that he had with this character that he played, which was himself, of course.

And so for me to make this Tableau is also to think about the kind of divide that happens in like a Caspar David Friedrich painting where you have access to a landscape or a vision and then you don't.

And that is what images in general provide to us.

There's a limit to what they provide even though there's this kind of sentiment that we have access to everything and we can you know, door dash a sandwich to our house within seconds, or pickleball court if we want.

No. I'm interested in what a landscape does to the person who stays inside it.

What happens if you spend weeks, maybe months or years, responding to a place, to one place, I've even played with the idea of making work again under the name Detlef or Detlen like I want because people they called me they asked me what's your name and I said Detlef and most of them the Irish people they said Detlen or Detlen so I thought Declan Lackawanna would be a nice alter ego for a kind of side reason not to Caspar David Friedrich.

But not copying romantic painting, but asking, what does romanticism even mean now, after photography, after digital culture, and even after artificial intelligence, after everything we know about tourism, about... ecology, technology, and representation, can you still stand in front of a landscape and simply look? Or are you always looking through a thousand other images?

And that connects directly to your future projects.

I love this painting.

This is probably one of my favorite paintings by Casper David.

Friedrich.

He was one of the old time.