Every so often, a gallery owner or collector will ask me if I do narrative paintings. I really don’t if you go by the usual definition of the genre, and having to explain what I do paint has prompted me to really examine why I make the art I make.  

This then, is a very personal reflection on that, and also the even larger issues of what art is about, what it does, and how I perceive the world I live in. Some of the ideas I’m going to talk about have come from collectors I’ve known, who have a deep understanding of art, born of their love of it. A lot of what I’m going to say here are ideas that I use to remind myself of where my focus needs to be in developing work. I’ll be speaking of painting because I am a painter, but I think what I’m going to say applies to almost all visual art. Each artist needs to apply it as their nature is so inclined.What this is all about is content in art. 

The narrative genre is widely understood to be the artist basically painting a story. A story that has a setting and characters and action that happens in time and leads to some result. In the case of a painting, if the narrative is culturally familiar, like a myth or an historic event, the artist chooses the scene that is most representative of the story or the most significant to recall the action. If the narrative is invented or involving concepts like surrealism, the artist provides clues that the viewer interprets. The big conceptual challenge is overcoming the fact that painting lacks the element of time.

Narrative Painting 

Before going further, let me talk about a couple of narrative paintings using the elements of narrative (time, place, characters, action, and meaning) in order to  provide a backdrop  for talking about content. Both were painted between 1935 and 1945 in America.

The first painting is Norman Rockwell’s, “Freedom of Speech”. As with almost all of Rockwell’s work, it was painted to be an illustration, a cover for the Saturday Evening Post magazine in 1943, at the height of  World War II. I chose an illustration to start, because illustrators tend to become illustrators because they are essentially story tellers by nature and paint to speak to the widest possible audience. They also paint for strong impact and are skilled at holding the attention of the viewer.

In the painting, the main figure, a “working man” is standing to speak at some kind of important, formal meeting, and because everyone is holding booklets, the subject is something complicated that’s going to effect the whole community. The intended message, which can be gotten even without the title is that every man (in America) can speak his mind and be heard.

In many ways, this is an incredibly well constructed painting and also, a very manipulative work, carrying a powerful message at the time, and beautifully designed to support the magazine’s brand image by playing to their readership. It is wonderfully painted, and during his life, Rockwell was admired by the public for his facility as much as for the vision he presented of an idealized America.    

Time

The biggest challenge any narrative painter has is creating time. It is the biggest difference between art and music. Music exists in time. I frequently think of music and art as sisters who are jealous of each other. Music is jealous of art because she has a physical form, and art is jealous of music because she has time.  

An artist creates time, by finding ways of keeping the viewer engaged with the work. Composition is important for a narrative painter. The composition has to lead the viewer around, keeping them curious and wanting to see and find more. Faces are the thing that people are drawn to look at the most and the faces here are designed to take you from one to the other. They are all looking at the speaker. You can’t help but wonder what the woman’s thinking, and even causing me to stop and wonder is a clever way of adding time.  

The Cast

The speaker is given a hero’s treatment. He stands tall, his head framed by the dark background, maybe a school blackboard. (The magazine’s name would surround it in print). He is dressed in work clothes and seems to have come from work. He’s read the document and has it rolled up in his pocket, giving the feeling he doesn’t need to refer to it. He’s got it all figured out. 

He’s handsome and the typical movie star version of an ideal man. His eyes are a light, bright blue, giving them a visionary quality. He’s young and his hands are large, worn from work, and strong. They are the hands of a doer. They are placed  firmly on the back of the bench, a stand-in for his feet, firmly planted on the  ground. People are listening intently and respectfully, reinforced by the ear of the partially visible man in the lower left corner. In every way, he is purposely designed to be an iconic picture of the everyman subscriber to The Post and a symbol for the dignity of the common man.

Most narrative art is made for a distinct purpose, as an entertainment, as a call to action, to inspire, and inform. One downside to narrative paintings, and especially illustrations, is that they can become dated, the more likely to do so when the purpose is relating to a social cause. In the Rockwell painting, for instance, notice that there is only one woman in the painting and she’s crammed behind the men. In 1940s America, the men made decisions about important matters. Also notice the lack of any racial or ethnic diversity. Both of these, in addition to the dress of the crowd, date the painting and place it in a specific time. There’s nothing wrong with this, and a great many narrative painters’ main interest is to give a picture of life in their own or different times and eras. Think of the work of Renoir, Goya, Hopper, Peale, Ingres, Vermeer, and Van Eyck. In fact there are certain things about life in past times that we only know from the art. Most musical instruments before the 1600s are only known by being pictured in art, including the instrument with the unfortunate name, Sackbut. 

Next let’s look at a painting by the self-taught, black artist, Horace Pippin—“John Brown on the Way to His Hanging” 

John Brown was an antislavery crusader in the 1850s. He was a  charismatic man, mercurial in temperament, and a man with a powerful moral resentment to the enslavement of black people. He was capable of inspiring followers and also of brutal violence when it suited his aims. He attempted a raid on an ammunition facility at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia), which failed. He was wounded and captured by troops led by Robert E. Lee, tried and hanged as a traitor on December 2, 1859. His insurrection and death contributed to dividing the nation and in part contributed to the beginning of the American Civil War. 

Odd coincidences surround his death and fame. John Wilkes Booth, the future assassin of Abraham Lincoln was in attendance at Brown’s execution, as was Horace Pippin’s grandmother, herself a former slave. Union troops adopted a song, “John Brown’s Body” which they sang marching into battle, and which eventually morphed into “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”. 

Artists were fascinated with him and he appeared in artwork throughout the early 20th Century. Including these pieces.    

I am purposely contrasting Horace Pippin with Norman Rockwell . They both painted at the same time. Whereas Rockwell was famous for his technical brilliance and romanticized, sometimes sentimental images. Pippin was self taught. His paintings are straight forward. There is no attempt to purposely manipulate the viewer. He presents the story in a way that lets you enter, free to experience the scene as though it were just happening. I’ve always admired his lack of pretense. He has a tendency to present objects in their most characteristic view, to me vaguely reminiscent of the the way Ancient Egyptian artists did. Both of these self portraits have a natural, unaffected quality to them, a quality that many highly trained artists have to struggle to achieve, and are rarely successful. 

In the painting, John Brown is on his way to the gallows. As history records, he is sitting on his coffin, bound at the elbows so that his forearms are free and is accompanied by the jailers and soldiers.  

Most narrative paintings provide a place for the viewer to stand or sit. Here, we are standing at the back of the crowd, at some distance. It’s an interesting choice, making me wonder if it’s to be able to include more of the scene, or are we standing further back because of the intensity of the event?  Even John Brown is facing away from us.There is almost no color in the painting except for the blue dress of the black woman in the lower right corner. And, she is the only person fully facing us.  

She is clearly frowning and distressed, and I’m certain that even though the subject of the painting is John Brown’s execution, she’s the focal point. She is the one casting the final judgement of what’s happening. She is the face of historic judgement, the face of future generations looking on. Unlike the Rockwell painting, and partly because this is a famous and actual historic event, the painting holds up better and feels more authentic from a message point of view.

This leads me to what I think content in art really is. 

Content in Art

For me, the content of all art is the experience of feeling and emotion. I start by saying this, because based on work I see and statements by artists, I suspect that many artists consider the content of their work to be the subject of a work, what they are actually painting or sculpting. But what a viewer actually gets is an experience, based on the image, the way the image is realized in the material, and the complex psychological mechanisms activated, all occurring in time. The content is aesthetic in nature, filtered through each person’s reality and then interpreted in ways relevant to a person’s life, what we think of as meaning in art. I tend to make a personal distinction between feeling and emotion in the way I think artists approach making art and how viewers experience it. 

The Science of Emotion

For psychologists, emotions deal with conscious thoughts and reasoning. They are located in the mind. Feelings are the conscious experience of emotional reactions and are felt in the body. Emotions pass quickly, feelings last longer, sometimes for decades. There is also a link between thought and emotion. Thoughts create emotions, and the reverse is true as well. Emotions create thoughts. It’s a constant circle. 

Looking at the two paintings again, what emotions you are feeling? A lot will depend on who you identify with, but, whatever emotions and feelings you have will shape the meaning you get from the work.  

Though we are mostly unaware of it, this unconscious link between emotion and thought is always with us, and is the engine behind the effectiveness of all forms of media, as well as advertising and marketing. It is the reason for a lot of what we consume beyond the necessities of life. And in fact, hunger, sex, the desire for personal validation, and our hunger for love drive more of our spending than we realize.

My Personal View

Because I tend to view the world from the perspective of an artist, my understanding of the distinction between feeling and emotion is more metaphoric. Feelings are the place where I live, like the landscape, and emotions come and go like the weather. Feelings and emotions are what give me the sense of being alive and make living worthwhile. The experiences I have with art tend to transport me out of the activity of self validation that I constantly live with, into a state where I just live. From my perspective, art’s function and importance centers on its focusing us on this sense of living. It’s like a vitamin pill for our psychic and spiritual life. 

Creating the Experience in Art

I think that an important starting place for creating experience, is to remember that art and the reality of life are not the same thing. For an artist to create a work that carries feeling and emotion, the material of their life needs to be transformed into a kind of visual poetry that will offer feeling to anyone open to it. The transformation comes as a result of the imaginative exploration of images using the vocabulary of the world of vision, all according to the artist’s unique nature and instincts.

It’s important for an artist to know and understand their own particular path from inspiration to poetry. This understanding introduces process into an artist’s practice and helps create a consistency of vision to their work. The inspiration may change over time, but if the process remains consistent, the work will still align with their previous work and reflect a consistent vision. 

Since I’m most familiar with my own process, I’ll use an example of my own work to show how this transformation can take place.

Is like…

There are two signs in my studio that help me in my daily work. One says, “Just Start”, because starting is always the hardest part for me. Once I start working, I’m past the hesitation, fears, and procrastination that can claim a day before I know it. The other sign says, “Is Like”, which reminds me by referring to the use of simile, that the goal is not to paint the literal image, but rather its poetic substance. It reminds me to ask myself what I can do to help people see in a new way.

That poetic substance usually presents itself to me in a flash of recognition. I’ll catch something out of the corner of my eye. The subject doesn’t have to be something grand, and is more likely to be something quite ordinary or familiar which I suddenly see in a new way. It could be an expression on a person’s face or the shape of an object that takes on an unfamiliar form. Most often however, it has to do with the way light is playing on the subject that reveals it to me in a new and unexpected way. 

I work from photographs now after decades of working from life, mainly because it gives me a chance to catch these fleeting glimpses that inspire me and also because it makes it possible to use Photoshop to amplify and clarify the aspects of the subject that I want to paint. The photo below is a good example of how the process begins to unfold for me. 

I was shooting photos of some peonies that a friend had brought me for possible use as painting subjects. I was photographing them using natural light that was coming through one of the studio windows. The day was cloudy and so the light was very consistent and even. All at once, the sun burst through a cloud and a ray of light came through the window and landed on the center of the flower. I quickly got that feeling of seeing the kind of glimpse I look for and shot this photograph. Almost as soon as I took the picture, the beam of light vanished. The moment was that fast. 

I think the photo itself is mysterious and beautiful, and I’m always asking myself if what I’m seeing is really a stand-alone photograph or the subject for a painting. They are different to me. Either the inherent properties of photography match the the image well, or I see the possibility of it being made more expressive by its being transformed using any number of means open to the painting process — creating a stronger graphic structure, manipulation of the color, the paint handling, the “thingness” that a painting has as a physical object, or the potential for creating the sense of felt space and presence that only a painting can do. 

While I might handle this subject differently now (this was seven years ago), this painting opened the door to seeing something that I see in almost everything I paint now. An inner light, an inner life. The flower seemed to illuminate the world around it, and its undulating forms began to be patterns of flow the way hair and flags move in a breeze. This made the painting not so much about a flower, but about something else. The final painting below shows how I chose to create this poetic view, clarifying a structure and creating a center of light that would act as a wheel, allowing the undulating forms of the petals to have a center of gravity. It’s as if the light came from inside the flower rather than from outside it. 

So, what does all of this have to do with narrative painting? 

Simply put, I think that all painting is narrative. Because of the way we mark time by events and assemble cause-and-effect scenarios for these events, we can’t help but hang our world on narrative. The question then, is who is creating the narrative, the artist or the viewer? And, how can an artist fit their style of narrative painting to their way of being in the world? From describing the two paintings at the beginning, it’s clear that I like narrative paintings, but I don’t make narrative paintings myself, because I don’t see the world that way. 

With narrative paintings, I enter them through my mind, through a thinking process, in some ways closer to the way I experience literature. I decode the image and reconstruct a scenario. In some cases, I need some background in order to fully participate in what the event is. In some ways, I’m as dependent on the title of the painting as the painting itself for experience. I have to think it before I feel it.

I tend to experience the world in almost the opposite way. I feel it and then think it. I live the experience most fully when it comes directly from my senses rather than through my mind, my thinking. On my own, in my most private place, this direct connection to my senses is where I tend to spend my time.

I’m essentially a shy person and someone who has always spent a great deal of time by myself. I like being with people one-on-one, and  I tend to see things one at a time. My gaze will fall on something that fascinates me, and I’ll be with it. It could be a flower, a face, the way the light falls on the oriental carpet in the living room. It’s all very interior. And so, this is the kind of art I want to make. Art that reflects my way of seeing the world.

Ironically, I do almost the exact opposite of what narrative painters do. Whether it is a painting of a nude, or a portrait or a simple bowl. I try to take time out of it, and I leave as much room as possible for the viewer to put it all back in. In each of these paintings, I feel as though I’ve put only as much as is necessary for the viewer to begin to make their own narrative out of what they are feeling.

I’ve often told about remembering the experience of learning to tie my shoes. I don’t know how old I was, but I have a very clear memory of it… making the loops and carefully pulling them, making sure everything was aligned, until they were tight. The memory centers on how it made me feel, the emotion I had. I remember being elated that I could do it. And over the years, I’ve come to think of this as an “I can” moment. And, I’ve also come to believe that these are an important part of being human and in many ways, how we create the people we are. When we have those I can moments in something we love doing, it’s tremendously satisfying. We are in the act of making and remaking ourselves, over and over. It’s the ageless part of us. When we focus on that, the world can be a better place.

Thomas Wharton studied at The Art Student’s League of New York, The New York Studio School, The New York Academy of Art, The Grand Central Academy, Parsons, School of Visual Arts, and The National Academy of Design. His work has won many awards, including The West Virginia Governor’s Award, The Georgie Read Barton Award, The Katlin Seascape Award (twice), the Windsor Newton Award, and the Richard C. Pionk Memorial Prize for Painting. He has been included in the Art Renewal Center’s Annual Salon, and his portrait work has been awarded a Certificate of Excellence by The Portrait Society of America, where he now has been given Signature Status.

He has shown at the National Arts Club in New York, The Salmagundi Club, the Dacia Gallery, the West Virginia University Museum of Art, The West Virginia Cultural Center, Tamatack, Stifel Fine Arts, ETC., the Wausau Museum of Contemporary Art, the RJD Gallery, Ille Arts Gallery, the Christine Frechard Gallery, and the Nutting Gallery. His work is included in the permanent Cultural Archives of the state of West Virginia, and his children’s book art is included in the permanent collection the the Mazza Museum of International Children’s Book Art. His paintings have been included many publications, including American Art Collector, Fine Art Connoisseur, International Artist, and Poets and Artists magazines, Whitehot Magazine, as well as the book, 21st Century Figurative Art: The Resurrection of Art. His paintings can be found in private and institutional collections throughout the United States.

In addition to his work as a fine artist, he has had a distinguished and successful career as a designer, illustrator, art director and creative director. His clients have included Cambridge University Press, Citibank, MasterCard, the New York Stock Exchange, Lifetime Television, Starwood Hotels, Clarins, Shiseido, Simon & Schuster, and New York University. His paintings are available from 33 Contemporary, Chicago.