Apocalyptic Artists

Benjamin West, Cityscape with Gathering Clouds, oil on paper, 3.8 x 6.4 cm

Philippe Jaques de Loutherbourg, Avalanche dans les Alpes, 1803, oil on canvas, 111 x 162 cm

William Blake, The Night of Enitharmon's Joy, 1795, watercolour, 44 x 58 cm

JMW Turner, The Deluge, 1805, oil on canvas, 143 x 235 cm

Samuel Colman,  The Rock of Salvation, 1837, oil on canvas, 61 x 74 cm

Francis Danby, The Deluge, 1840, oil on canvas, 284 x 452 cm

Each of these artists who work with apocalyptic imagery I found within the text The Apocalyptic Sublime by M D Paley (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1986). I am beginning to develop the idea that a lot of historical artists who dealt with ideas surrounding the apocalypse predominantly conveyed these ideas through landscape paintings. This allowed for awe-inspiring atmospheric effects to be depicted, and convey to the viewer a sense of the magnitude of the imagined events. I am sensing a common theme between many of the artists I am looking at to pay a lot of attention to rendering in very detailed and ominous cloud formations, often with the sky taking up two thirds of the picture frame. There is a tendency to couple these clouds with a sunset, and I particularly love the subtlety of Benjamin West's Cityscape with Gathering Clouds where the sun is just a small pulsing dot of red amongst a sea of blue shadows. As there is a theme in depicting apocalyptic imagery in working with the biblical sense of a flood, a deluge, rough and tumultuous seas fight against dwarfed human figures, such as in JMW Turner's The Deluge. I love how a lot of these artists work with fairly muted palettes shot through with some sort of vibrant orange or red as I believe it truly instills within us a sense of horror and dread. Coupled with this terror though is also an evident pursuit of depicting the sublime as there is true beauty in these scenes as equally as there is destruction and chaos. For me, I think it will be important to consider what sort of scale I want to work at and how zoomed out from the images I am generating the standpoint of the viewer will be. I will also need to consider how to instill such a sense of atmospheric mood in my work or whether I want my work to differ by playing with this idea and whether or not it is present in the paintings as perhaps this is more of a contemporary stance on apocalyptic imagery.