Narrative art

A narrative is simply a story. Narrative art is art that tells a story. Much of Western art until the twentieth century has been narrative, depicting stories from religion, myth and legend, history and literature (see history painting). Audiences were assumed to be familiar with the stories in question. (Tate definition)

My practise is strongly concerned with storytelling, and that is what narrative art does. I have found stop motion to be a very effective way to tell a story as it is engaging and accessible.

Some good examples of narrative art are:

Josephine and the Fortune-Teller (1837)

This a piece by Sir David Wilkie painted for John Abel Smith, M.P., and exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1837. The subject was an incident from Josephine’s youth on the island of Martinique. Wilkie may have taken the details of his picture from an account by John Memes, who in his 1831 ‘Memoirs of the Empress Josephine’.

The Headless Horseman Pursuing Ichabod Crane (1858)

This piece is by American artist John Quidor, depicting a scene from Washington Irving’s short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”.

Guernica (1937)

This piece is by Pablo Picasso, it is considered one of the most moving and powerful anti-war paintings in history. The large mural shows the suffering of people wrenched by violence and chaos. Prominent in the composition are a gored horse, a bull, and flames.
The painting was created in response to the bombing of Guernica, a Basque Country village in northern Spain, by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italian warplanes at the request of the Spanish Nationalists.

These pieces are important to me as they all have a story to tell. Storytelling has always been apart of my nature and researching artists who have incorporated this into their art has been very useful to my own practise.