In all honesty, I was hoping a Friedrich painting would appear in this list of artwork. I fell in love with his work ever since Professor Richmond-Garza (I love that woman) used him to illustrate a point while we were reading Goethe’s Faust. The problem is, I never stopped to ask why: why did I fall in love with his paintings, why did I feel the way I felt? Just. Why?

[And now I can begin to attempt to answer those questions.]

In Friedrich’s painting “The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog,” there is a man standing on a cliff. All we can see of him is his back, an unruly mop of dark blond hair, his walking-stick, his dandy-looking coat (my apologies, I am not, nor do I claim to be, an expert in 1800s menswear), one hand either tucked in his pocket or on his hip as the other hand braces the walking stick upon the rocks, and one leg propped up as the other leg is still in the back. The fact that, as you mentioned, he is hiking in formalwear simply made me wonder if we ever really take off all our masks. Who is he dressed up for? What is he dressed up for? You may think that once you get home, you can take a deep breath and be the real “you,” but is the real “you” the same “you” when you’re on the internet, or cooking dinner, or preparing to go to sleep?

There is a lonely quality about this painting that I find a little beautiful, a little haunting, and a little all too familiar. Although the perspective of the image is such that it invites us to stare out at the “Sea of Fog” along with this Wanderer, yet his stance contradicts this with his back facing us, counting us out of the picture. Whether Friedrich is trying to tantalize me with the promise and the curse of a turned back, never allowing me to see this Wanderer’s face, I don’t know. But oftentimes I feel like that Wanderer: alone, even with company. There is the idea that you don’t know exactly how somebody feels, simply because you are different people with different personalities and responses to life and even physiological disparities that prevent you from knowing exactly how someone feels. Everybody experiences life differently, but more importantly, everybody experiences life singularly – by themselves, with their own inner thoughts and emotions. A depressing thought that I have found to be quite true in my short span of life.

I found the colors dreamy and captivating, a nice juxtaposition of the dark against the light. The dark cliffs that the man is standing upon suggests that maybe he has just made it through a personal darkness or hardship (A really crappy hike up a mountain does count. Re: Lord of the Rings: All of them). The lighter colors in the background are ethereal, full of light and maybe a little bit deceptive in that they seem to promise the viewer a sunny endpoint/destination, yet there are more dark cliffs and hills that lie ahead.

The first instinct I had was to assign a specific destination at all to said Wanderer – the mountains in the distance, or that castle-looking plateau ahead. Then I remembered that the subject of the artwork is indeed a Wanderer. So there went that analysis. 

Things are expressed differently from medium to medium, in my opinion. I could describe that the sky is this particular shade of cerulean, that the fog looks like wisps of freshly spun cotton candy, or that Wanderer’s hair is a tangle of golden whiplash curls that are darker near the roots but illuminated by the sunlight at the tips… but did I really? Do you see the same thing I do? Do we see colors in the same way? Do you see royal blue instead of cerulean? Do you think his hair just looks like a mess? Nevertheless, seeing this image captured in beautiful words, I think, would not diminish the emotions it evicted from my heart. The emotions are identical, but the way in which we process and think about them may perhaps reach vastly differing conclusions.

So, what did viewing, thinking about, and analyzing this picture reveal about me? I’m really not sure, but in reading my response, I can conclude that