​And the Makings of the Sublime, by Tahkouhie H. Antaramian

Vir Heroicus Sublimis, by Barnett Newman (USA) 1950-1951

​And the Makings of the Sublime 
 
Is he the Monk by the Sea,
where monumental blue and black and white horizonal swaths speak
to the future of Rothko colour fields and Barnett’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis.

Is it chromatic wonderment that conjures
a redemptive sadness when I stand before such grandeur
at Berlin’s Alte Nationalgalerie,

Or is it the moment of disengaging my own consciousness
that carries me back to Friedrich and toward his soma-psyche 
when in 1808 he reached for another paintbrush. 

He asks to be spun within his chrysalis--
a chrysalis that hangs within its hardened shelter
away from feelings of transience where nothingness is the unknowable
liminal space mediated by his paintings.

Here is a contemplation of both the terror and the awe,
the wrath of nature as it untouches us as we sit wrapped
tightly in an armchair in a corner of Kant’s towery library.

Is he the monk who is carried under the arch of the Abbey in the Oak Forest,
where black figural vertical smears are scattered
in the foreground of those who redeem a sadness
now put to rest and of those lanky lamenters further lost
within the murky mist of pigmented oil and varnish.

The crescent moon, barely finding the mourners.
Jagged branches barren of their spring and summer lushness,
put forth their crooked umber fingers, lengthening each year, arching with stiffness,
reaching out into the ether as the Abbey slowly crumbles.

As amor fati, he asks to leave it to time to decide
if he becomes a brilliant butterfly or a maggot,
as it is the sublime that arises when Friedrich becomes the fluttering warrior
with its transformed beauty in his afterlife rather than the thing that devours dying flesh.

Tahkouhie H. Antaramian

Tahkouhie H. Antaramian is an Armenian-born American artist and writer in Fresno, California. She is a PhD candidate and teaches art history for several colleges. Antaramian is a member of Fig Tree Gallery. She received the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation grant for Stream of Light: Art and Ethnography of the Post-WWII Repatriation to Soviet Armenia. She has authored  journal publications on post-WWII diasporan studies of the Nerkaght. Her last show on the subject was Imaginary Letters to Vasily Grossman in Paris. When not visiting her life companion in Italy, Antaramian lives with her two sons, sister, and a menagerie of animals in California.

Monk by the Sea, by Caspar David Friedrich (Germany) 1808-1810

Abbey in the Oakwood, by Caspar David Friedrich (Germany) 1810