Mysterious ruins excite imagination of many artists and each of them seeks to convey its personal view, mood or idea that often, express nostalgia for the bygone past. German Romantic (XVIII-XIX) landscape painter– Caspar David Friedrich is an outstanding example of such subjective, emotional response to the mystery of nature. His following works: ‘The dreamer’, ‘Abbey in the Oakwood’, ‘Monastery Graveyard in the Snow’, ‘Ruins of Eldena Monastery’, ‘Monk in the Snow’ etc., served as the main source of inspiration for creating of this project. I photograph beautiful, graceful Gothic ruins everywhere I can find them, but this project runs mainly in Belgium, Germany and France. All these buildings are distinguished by one important factor - they have been destroyed during the French Revolution, or have been used after it as quarries, therefore a lot of historical buildings have disappeared forever. Fortunately, one day these practices have been stopped, and ruined buildings were preserved to condition we can see them now. Fascinated by the work of Caspar David Friedrich, I decided to reconstruct the nostalgic scenes that he depicted in his paintings. However, unlike him, who widely used Biblical symbolism and metaphors, I tried to put more emphasis on the aesthetics of the ruin as an independent object, giving special attention to its structure, design and finishing details. But It would be an artistic sin to parse these monumental objects to their base components and deprive them from its authentic atmosphere and surrounding beauty. For this reason fantastic plots on which anonymous heroes, magic light, dramatic nature of bad weather and unification with the nature, sometimes replace strict, technical and geometrically verified images (see Homagium II). In Germany, I even found the ruins, which Caspar David Friedrich painted most often - the ruins of Eldena abbey. One of the photos of this building is the key to this project and used as the main image for this site.
