NARRATIVE ART

“A picture is worth a thousand words.” – Unknown

What is Narrative Art?

Narrative Art tells a story. It uses the power of the visual image to ignite imaginations,
evoke emotions and capture universal cultural truths and aspirations. What distinguishes
Narrative Art from other genres is its ability to narrate a story across diverse cultures,
preserving it for future generations.
Narrative Art can be a potent medium to narrate a particular story despite barriers in
language or culture.
Narrative Art allows the observer of an artwork to pore through pages of history and even
“interact” in a certain way to the characters presented in a particular event or situation.
Just like an author said, “Art is a one-sided conversation with the unobserved.”
Narrative Art is also used, even exploited, in politics by those leaders who only wanted to
show their “successes” or “triumphs” to the people both during their time and for future
generations as a lasting remembrance.
“For all that we know, our history is only what the winners have aimed to tell us, much rather
than what the objective truth was like.”
Narrative Art was NOT only limited to history painting.
- Narrative Art became the venue for narrating simple yet objective lives of ordinary
people, detailing echoes of their laughter and tears painted in canvass as a reminder
of their being mortal, showing their daily grind to survive in this oft- hostile world.
Famous Narrative Artist and their Artworks
Leonardo Da Vinci
-Leonardo da Vinci was a painter, engineer, architect, inventor, and student of
all things scientific. His natural genius crossed so many disciplines that he
epitomized the term “Renaissance man.”
Vincent Van Gogh
Vincent Willem van Gogh was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who posthumously became one
of the most famous and influential figures in Western art history. In a decade, he created about
2,100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings, most of which date from the last two years of his
life.

Pablo Picasso
- Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and theatre
designer who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the most influential artists of the 20th
century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture,
the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore.