We Have Such Sights to Show You, 2024

The title of this painting comes from a line in Hellraiser, based on the novella The Hellbound Heart by Clive Barker. To me, the line perfectly captures the mystique of the sublime: the deep-seated fascination with danger, and the urge to explore it. The sublime can be understood as the call to adventure, or the longing to experience something bigger than ourselves through nature. Beginning around the 17th century, the sublime has been illustrated in paintings of big skies, chaotic storms, and wide-open natural spaces, but I find a more internalized representation of the sublime in images of things like dark forests, underwater passages, and strange animals.