A Few Words About What I Do (Part 4)

To conclude this little series I would like to make a distinction between the art of narrative painting and what is the most popular dramatic art of out time: the movies. 

Thomas Grimball 1780  (detail)                 Collection Mr and Mrs Paul Grimball Marshall Jr.

on permanent loan to the Old Exchanges Building, Charleston, South Carolina

A film maker has thousands of frames to tell a story, hours of screen time and with the aid of sound, dialog and music, his cameras and crew. A painter must put the whole thing across on a single canvas, with his tubes of muddy colors, a few brushes and what wits he has been given. 

Four colors for mixing skin tones

But by the same token, painting offers the artist and viewer time to pause and reflect at leisure on that single, beautiful moment, soak in its drama and consider its meaning. In a painting one can stop and gaze upon each character to love, pity or despise him. To consider what each element that’s been included adds to the picture. Attitude and gesture, light and dark, color and form, content and style. All these things can be taken in as a whole or considered individually. 

David and Goliath  (detail)  2007                                                  collection of the artist

The degree to which these things are possible, both in the making and in looking, are unique to painting; in no other artistic discipline can a single moment be taken hold of, ordered and held up for all to see. Nowhere is there so much freedom for artistic interpretation without doing injury to the meaning the story.

 This is what I do, or at least what I attempt to do, and this is why the practice of painting holds my attention and my affection and why I think it should hold yours as well.

A Few Words About What I Do (Part 3)

As we saw in Part 2 of this series, a painting of an object or a place can be read by the viewer as nothing more than what it immediately appears to be. A proper narrative painting like the one below is quite another matter: clearly something is happening.

"The presentation at the Temple"  2012                  Collection of St Philips Church, Charleston, South Carolina

The thing that is being attempted in such a painting is rather the opposite of the still life or portrait: to take a story, find the critical moment upon which the dramatic tension of the story hangs and capture it in a single frame. The figures must be arranged on the canvas in such a way so that their emotions and gestures add all they can to the story without distracting from the focus of the picture. 

It is a venture not without risk. Months of preparation and work go into a canvas and in it a painter has the burden of capturing a single moment in dramatic clarity, with skill of perception and brush, so that it is communicated to the viewer with all its intended meaning.