Abbey In An Oak Forest

I decided to create a watercolor painting based off the style of Caspar David Friedrich’s oil painting, Abbey in an Oak Forest, 1809-1810. Friedrich’s painting depicts a funeral procession through the ruins of a Gothic styled abbey, the landscape is snow covered and barren trees surround the remains of the abbey indicating a winter scene. The twilight sky is painted in muddy shades of orange and yellow before meeting the black obscured horizon. My painting depicts a similar scene of vaguely Gothic chapel amidst a snow-covered forest though rather than barren trees mine is filled with evergreen trees. Composition wise my piece is meant to be unbalanced, shifted mostly to the right and from a partially aerial view above a patch of the woods.

The setting depicted in my painting comes from a story I have been writing and was actually influenced by the grim look and emotion that I felt Abbey in an Oak Forest evoked which is why I kept the concept similar.

Hence, why a (somewhat) Gothic looking chapel is in my piece as well. The idea of an abandoned church seemed haunting to me, but I also included it because Gothic architecture symbolized both German nationalism and the Romantic ideal of intuition over calculation. Motifs that were largely represented through the iconography in Friedrich’s work1. I also included a graveyard which I had appear in ruins (some graves and crosses are falling apart while others are buried, the wall around has been reduced to rubble) while the church instead, though abandoned, is still standing. It shows only little signs of neglect (small cracks and moss growing on the right side) in comparison, which indicate it has been deserted more

recently.
Being a romantic image, the emotional and symbolic aspects of the painting were a major focus. Therefore, the graveyard was also included being itself a place with death and its decay into to ruins further suggest this, as for the church, while it is not as far in ruins, it has been abandoned and so its demise is implied to be not far behind. Likewise, why I too went with a snow-scape setting as it also represents death, in a sense, to nature. Furthermore, I did my painting in a limited palette of muted colors consisting of mainly white and black with minimal use of yellow, brown, green and blue. I extended the diluted black I used for the snow into the area that is meant to be the night sky, using blotted brush strokes as to make no distinct lines thereby obscuring the horizon. I did this so that there would be major areas of negative space which in combination with the use of dark colors and the uneven compositional balance express the idea of loss and abandonment as is done in the original painting2.
Though Friedrich’s painting appears somber with its dull colors and dark themes it does present the suggestion of hope in his use of light for the setting sun, as well as the presence of a sliver of a moon and there is also suggestion of rebirth come spring since the trees are only barren not dead3. One thing I chose to do differently with my painting was to erase this sense of hope because the sadder tone of the painting had a stronger focus to me. This is why I painted evergreen trees because they keep their leaves year-round, even in winter, so there is a vagueness in whether there will be a rebirth of this place and that maybe the “death” and abandonment of the space this church is at will be eternal. I also used a diluted wash of yellow in the sky, not to convey a time or add a bright note, but to try and create the look of natural lighting that the sky can sometimes seem to have night in isolated areas. This also the case for the non-visible moon creating the light source around the graveyard and in front of the church, it is a naturalistic look with no symbolic suggestion to it.