Sacred Reverence

This painting was inspired by Chauncey Bradley Ives’ Undine Rising from the Fountain (1810–1894), itself rooted in Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s novella Undine. Yet my work takes a different path. In Introspection I sought to capture the quiet force of the inward gaze; here, viewed from below, Undine herself becomes the vessel through which I sought to embody Kant’s idea of reverence for the moral law (Achtung fürs Gesetz). The upward perspective lends her an aura of the sacred—inviting not mere emotion, but the inner necessity of reason recognizing the authority of the moral law, to which we are both authors and subjects.