Martin Johnson Heade: Approaching Thunder Storm, 1859
Dexter Dalwood: Bay of Pigs, 2004
Fitz Henry Lane: Fishing Party, 1850
Ciaran Murphy: Lightning Storm, 2008
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Albert Pinkham Ryder: Siegfried and the Rhine Maidens, 1891
Inka Essenhigh: Snow, 2007
Leon Dabo: The Seashore, 1900
Wilhelm Sasnal
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These two qualities, the daunting and the fascinating, now combine in a strange harmony of contrasts, and the resultant dual character of the numinous consciousness, to which the entire religious development bears witness, at any rate from the level of the ‘daemonic dread’ onwards, is at once the strangest and most noteworthy phenomenon in the whole history of religion. The daemonic-divine object may appear to the mind an object of horror and dread, but at the same time it is no less something that allures with a potent charm, and the creature, who trembles before it, utterly cowed and cast down, has always at the same time the impulse to turn to it, nay even to make it somehow his own. The ‘mystery’ is for him not merely something to be wondered at but something that entrances him; and beside that in it which bewilders and confounds, he feels a something that captivates and transports him with a strange ravishment, rising often enough to the pitch of dizzy intoxication; it is the Dionysiac-element in the numen. –Rudolf Otto. The Idea of the Holy. p31.
P.S. an approach to American Luminism:
