The Visual Narrative

This past week, our class has been discussing the meaning of the visual narrative. A formal definition would define the term as the story that accompanies a certain image, but, some pictures communicate far more than any words could express. To put it as plainly as possible, every picture has a story behind it; painters do not just paint a picture for the sheer entertainment (although this cannot be generalized for all artists of the sort) of it, they have reasons behind every brushstroke, behind every color, and behind every figure. You would be hard pressed to find an image that had a purposeless figure in it or an out of place object in the background; an artist would not spend hours to years on a particular piece to have objects in it with no message behind them. Keeping this in mind, as mindful observers, we must take the time to think about the stories accompanied with the image either before or after the depicted moment. These aspects lend important clues to the meaning of particular elements and must be considered in order to get the most out of admiring a piece of art. If you want to be inspired or touched by a painting, you must open your mind to inspiration—critical thinking is crucial. True inspiration comes to those who take the time to invest themselves in the process of reading the visual narrative, a story that is always unfolding to the open-minded.