There are a couple works by women artists taking on hyper-commodified femininity. Above is Regina Jacobson’s The Cult of Beauty Altarpiece from 2013. The artist writes that this painting is about the devotion to the idol of beauty and the figures here “need to be considered worthy of acceptance while surrounded by a society that places so much value on appearances and wealth. To depict a sense of inner turmoil I stripped away the veneer of beauty, choosing rather to constrain the vulnerable solo figure in a stark and dimly lit environment. While this allows the viewer an emotional but empathetic perspective of the struggling figure, it also becomes a vehicle to transport the physical narrative to the metaphysical – to a deeply personal place where we wrestle with choices. The symbolic gauge of whether the figure considers herself acceptable or not, worthy or not, is a large yellow circle on the floor. While the circle defines the edges of her desire to measure up to idealized standards, it also hints at the futility of being admired for physical beauty alone.”

Sherri Wolfgang’s painting Lunching in Westport from 2014 similarly takes on unreasonable standards of beauty and the plastic surgery industry. Wolfgang lives in Westport, CT and painted a series about cosmetic surgery called Twisted. In this painting from the series, three women who have done too much plastic surgery lunch together at a kitchen table in Westport (well, it’s more of a liquid lunch). The women are bandaged from recent surgeries, and the bald woman’s hair fell out after getting too many hair extensions. The three are talking about and supporting one another in the next surgery they will undergo.

Wolfgang writes “Our society’s culture of youth obsession and physical beauty has taken its toll on American women’s self-image and esteem – to the point of twisting and distorting their own bodies and minds.”

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Above is Gerrit von Honthorst’s painting The Dentist from 1622. I’m grateful that dentistry has advanced greatly since the Baroque age. Who ever heard of dentistry in a dark room at night lit by a single candle? Honthrost was a Dutchman who spent his early painting years in Italy admiring the work of Caravaggio and used light in a similar fashion. The candlelight creates a much more dramatic scene, lighting up the faces of the gawkers, one of whom holds back the hand of the tortured man in the chair. Extractions were common and caused excruciating pain before anesthesia was invented in the mid-19^th century. Novocain was invented in 1905, around the same time that people started using toothbrushes and toothpaste.

Medicine has come a long way too, as evidenced by Adriaen Brouwer’s painting Feeling from 1635. Here we see a Chinese doctor operating on a patient in the corner of a Dutch tavern, while a crony pokes his head between the two to get a better look. Given his shabby outfit and the unsanitary conditions, we suspect that the doctor is not on the up-and-up. Brouwer mostly painted genre scenes/studies of exaggerated facial expressions, this one being a study of excruciating pain.

In medieval and Renaissance Europe it was a commonly held belief that madness resided in the ‘Stone of Madness’ or the ‘Stone of Folly,’ a hard lump thought to be found in the prefrontal cortex. Charlatan doctors would perform a surgery to extract this ‘stone’ from the patient who exhibited behaviors of mental illness, depression, stupidity, or dementia. These doctors performed a trepanation, which is scraping out a burr hole in the skull. In ancient times trepanation was believed to release evil spirits that caused madness.

No one has been able to definitively attribute this painting Extracting the Stone of Madness to a particular artist, although we know that it is from 17^th Century Holland. The quack leans in over the patient, who screams out in agony; after all, this was before anesthesia and must have been quite a painful procedure to endure. The table is littered with the doctor’s tools of the trade and a servant boy stands at the ready to receive the stone upon extraction.

Not all medical practitioners operated in backrooms of taverns in 17th Century Holland. Rembrandt gives us a portrayal of professional doctors working to understand the inner workings of the body in his painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp from 1632. Here we see the members of the Amsterdam Guild of Surgeons as they perform their annual public dissection.

They are dissecting the body of a man who has just been hanged for criminal acts. There probably would have been many more people present at the dissection and Dr. Tulp would have had an assistant do the actual work, but Rembrandt has ingeniously brought focus upon the doctor by placing him in an active role, front and center. There is an anatomy book placed at the body’s feet that represents the interest in science and learning during the Baroque era.

Education in medicine has advanced across generations and continents. American painter Thomas Eakins famously painted The Gross Clinic in 1875. Dr. Samuel Gross was a professor of surgery at Philadelphia’s Jefferson Medical College in the 19^th C and is seen here with blood on his hand presiding over a surgery on a teenage boy’s thigh. At the time, Dr. Gross had come up with a new surgical procedure to treat bone infections. No one is wearing surgical gloves; germ theory (and the fact that bacteria cause infections) only became standard knowledge in the 1880’s.

The amphitheatre of doctors and medical students all take a cold, unfeeling approach to looking at the operation in action, and so they should. It wouldn’t do to have doctors shielding their eyes from the sight of blood like the mother of the teenage boy here does. We identify with her because we aren’t accustomed to the sight of open flesh either.

Another interesting tangent in paintings of medical advancement is Franz Sedlacek’s Moulage Studio from 1932. Moulage is the practice of making models for medical study. Historically the models were made from wax and felt lifelike, so that doctors could be properly trained to identify and treat diseases such as tuberculosis and leprosy.

Sedlacek gives us a scene where a well-dressed sinister-looking man arrives with his porter, valise in hand, at the moulage studio. A woman is painting a half mannequin in the back room. Busts and fully-costumed mannequins fill the shelves and closet. The “doctor” who runs the studio has removed the top half of a skull from a mannequin and is showing off the merchandise to the newly arrived customer, but what does the customer want with it?

Goodness, I just realized that all these paintings are incredibly dark, which is stark contrast to a typical clinical setting today. Thank goodness.

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Calypso is a nymph, said to be the daughter of Pleione (mother of the Pleiades) and Atlas (the Titan who is forced to hold up the heavens after being on the losing side of the Titanomachy war of the gods).

Zeus was angry with Odysseus (Roman name Ulysses) after Odysseus’ starving crew ate sacred cattle on the island of Helios. Zeus drowned the crew and shipwrecked Odysseus on the isle of Ogygia, inhabited by Calypso. Her name means ‘she who conceals,’ so it is fitting that she keeps Odysseus hidden for seven years, while the whole world is looking for him. She promises him immortal life in exchange for becoming her husband. Odysseus never cedes to her proposal, all the while longing to return to Ithaca and his wife Penelope.

Throughout Homer’s Odyssey, Athena acts as a guardian angel, protecting Odysseus on his journey home. She pled with Zeus to release Odysseus from Calypso. Here we see Athena floating in the sky, protecting Odysseus, while Zeus pulls Odysseus onto a raft to send him home. Calypso apprehensively lurks in the background, watching her beloved being pulled from her clutches.

The post Pierre Charles Tremolieres, Ulysses Lands on the Isle of Calypso, 1737 first appeared on Narrative Painting.

Laurence’s parents were Holocaust survivors but spoke nothing of it to Laurence until later in his life. Since then he has been learning about the Jewish faith and painting his questions about the Holocaust. While working through his ideas on this story of Aaron he says “I realized that Auschwitz is the temple and the goats are us.” In the background we see the gates of Auschwitz, which carry the slogan “Arbeit Macht Frei” in German (“Work sets you free”).

The post Geoffrey Laurence, Atonement, 2022 first appeared on Narrative Painting.

The post Carl Dobsky, Keeping Warm (Man Setting Himself on Fire), 2022 first appeared on Narrative Painting.

A teenager has carelessly started a fire and it is having an immediate effect upon Nature, as evidenced by the escaping fox. The iconic Mt. Hood (just outside of Portland) can be seen in the distance. In September 2017 teens lit some firecrackers in the Columbia Gorge forest which resulted in the Eagle Creek Fire that burned 50,000 acres and snowed ashes on Portland for days. The climate crisis we are experiencing just compounds fires like these, yet we all seem to be indifferent to news reports on climate change.

The post Aron Johnston, Indifference, 2018 first appeared on Narrative Painting.

The young artist has been caught slacking off while AI paints his painting for him. The flat ladder symbolizes unsuccessful status seeking and the robotic arm is a folly in itself: a high tech piece of equipment made from wood. Chmilar says “The sandwich to me is from a potentially much deeper thought questioning purpose: ‘What would we rather be doing?’ To me, the idea of wanting to cut time off of an art process is deeply philosophical. ‘To have more time for what?’ I ask. Eating bigger sandwiches?”

Chmilar is fascinated by the inherent faults of the human mind, the common desire to clamor for undeserved status, the culture of ‘Fake it ‘til you make it.’ He states that “contradictions abound; many who likely don’t like the market system work directly to its whim. ‘Go, go, go!’ ‘Good enough’ and ‘quantity over quantity’ are ideas that we often dislike when we are the receivers, but we play directly into when we are the producers.”

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At some point in every artist’s career (if not all the time) they find themselves wondering if they should have chosen a different vocation, one filled with wealth and stability. A life in art is risky business. I often say it is like a sickness or an addiction, yet artists cannot help themselves. Calenzo is working on a series about amateur inventors called The Tinkerers; the paintings have allegorical characters who represent choosing a creative life over a stable vocation. Calenzo states that this tinkerer “would like to be remembered as a successor to Houdini, but his plan to escape his iron box and fly back to shore with his Drone Helmet has hit a few snags.”

The post Vincent Calenzo, Drone, 2022 first appeared on Narrative Painting.

Happy Halloween!

The post Victor Vasnetsov, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, 1887 first appeared on Narrative Painting.

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