Friedrich’s paintings are hungry paintings. They pull their viewers in, enticing them with loneliness. But you can’t find your footing in the empty spaces, and you start to lose yourself. This is the opposite of what happened to the people I described in the last two chapters. St. Catherine, St. Francis, and the others all suffered from pictures that had too much in them, that were too dense, too aggressive, too full. Friedrich’s paintings are too empty, the things in them too far away. The paintings in the last two chapters pushed on people, hurling them away. These pull on their viewers,
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