I enjoy watching the restrained narrative art, those who need to guess what's going on based on clues - and more often on intuition - which feels like crawling along a crevice to explore into the depths of a cliff and then discovering a new dimension of openness.
Timothy Lai
I loved reading Timothy Lai's title for the works, another case of text intervening in the picture. He borrows specific images from art history and mythology to explore his hybrid identity, traversing memory, imagination and history, woven into the elusive poses of the figures in his paintings.
For Their Comfort
To Look, to See, to Place My Body in Relation to
Beyond this Point: Members Only
“2021.” Timothy Lai. Accessed November 14, 2022. https://www.timothylai.com/2021.
Gabriella Boyd
Colour and shape are the most eye-catching parts of Boyd's narrative paintings, and after that, a closer look at the images gives the viewer satisfying clues and details, all of which are presented in a pleasing way - and the artist's playful observation and contemplation of everyday life is the spice that makes narrative paintings interesting.
David Inshaw
Inshaw takes modern elements and implants them into ethereal imagery. The intentional dissonance gives Inshaw's paintings a surreal quality, and he believes that a painting can give a more universal and profound meaning to a moment by combining many unrelated moments into one. He explains how each of his paintings grows out of his life: "...and all these things become part of the process of painting which is part of my life. That is why every element of the painting is significant, revelatory. They contain my feelings and thoughts. They are paintings of this world, but also of the world of daydreams in my head."
(The Times newspaper, September 2004.)
Fire Eater( 2015)
Julia Soboleva
The first time that I saw Soboleva's paintings I felt uneasy, yet also unable to move my eyes - silent swarming communities of bird-headed creatures, while ghosts perform strange rituals. In her biography, she writes: "Being born and raised in a post-Soviet era and not being able to find her own place against the complicated past of her nation”. Her work is a strong narrative that portrays some of the dramatic scenes, which are full of contradictions and unreality. ‘Family, taboo and trans-generational trauma’ are the most common notions. Her images seem to foretell the future as well as to allude to the present, with a strong anti-utopian undertone.
CROSSING POINT OF LIGHT( 2021)
Derek Paul Jack Boyle
As someone prone to whimsy, I often lose myself in staring at an object or scene, which gives me a lot of resonance with Derek's work. The principal characters in his paintings are objects from everyday life: dice, clocks, cigarettes, ladders, arrows. He intersperses his unique imagination between objectively cold objects, endowing them with a momentary metaphor. A moment is preserved like a snapshot, framed in a nearly impossible moment, such as a key inserted into an eggshell. Creating a paradoxical feeling between fairy tales and reality for the spectator.
Keyed Up, acrylic and flashe on cradled birch panel( 2020)
"We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can we glance at the past and find out what we have experienced and what meaning it has."
Kundera, M. (1974). Laughable loves.
Milan Kundera
What is most fascinating about Kundera's work is how it presents life in an illuminating way, how each situation is filled with allegories due to the motives that, although surprising, also resonate strongly. To read Kundera's novels is to be amazed at how prevalent the allegories analysed by the author are in ordinary life, and how they have such a continuous impact on the path of life which leads to a new reflection on reality.