AUTUMN WAS FAST receding, so it was time to go out and capture the diminishing colors. I’d painted at this local cemetery before, once as a snow scene. So I returned to scout its autumn tree line. Outdoor painting in a city can offer many distractions. For the absence of noise and spectators, however, there’s nothing like a cemetery. There’s peace and quiet, with an emphasis on peace.
In a way, the scruffy painter is intruding on the dead. And yet it may also be the rare homage, for who but a painter will stand in a cemetery for three hours, eyes fixed on the unique architecture and landscaping. Cemeteries are not popular subjects for painting. Once the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) established the memorable image of dark, Gothic graveyards, that bleak reputation has stuck. Not an easy subject to hang in the parlor.
Even before Friedrich’s painterly Romanticism, the British philosopher Edmund Burke gave us his treatise on the sublime in art (1757). In short, Burke said, the sublime is the beauty, or thrilling sensation, we feel from being on the edge of danger or death. Think precipitous mountain ledges. Or, think storm-lashed cemeteries.
For anyone, much less the painter, burial grounds are unique places of reflection. From a painter’s point of view, though, many of the nation’s cemeteries offer splendid tomb architecture, statuary, and vistas. I chose my graveyard jaunt on a cheery autumn day. As I painted, I met two organizers for the local “Wreaths Across America,” an annual mid-December commemorative event held for fallen, or deceased, veterans dating from the American Revolution to the present.
The tradition was started by a family-owned wreath company in the upper Midwest. Doing well by doing good, as they say! Still, as the marketing theme became a non-profit movement, the sublime took over. One December Saturday each year, throngs gather to lay wreaths and tiny flags at thousands of cemeteries.
The story I was told by these passing acquaintances enriched my day of painting. Not only could I picture myself under a tombstone one day—and all that this meant for living—but I envisioned thousands of those who made willing sacrifices. And, as well, could see the dramatic difference between the living and the dead in general. Something sublime. Another element of the sublime is to feel diminishingly small in the face of something majestically large. Even the sweet terror of that largeness. Such is a cemetery.
Well, fortunately, I was focusing on getting the autumn colors correct on my canvas and, yes, the appropriate shadows on the tombstones.
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