Tag Archives: narrative painting

The Lebowski Cycle – The Agony in the Garden

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The Agony in the Garden (After Carracci) • Joe Forkan 2006-2011 oil on linen, 76" x 48" (193.04 cm x 121.92)

Here’s another recently completed painting from The Lebowski Cycle. The fall show at The Frank M. Doyle Arts Pavilion is rapidly approaching, and I’m wrapping up paintings that have literally been in constant renegotiation in the studio for years.

This one, like about half of the paintings in the series, is based on paintings dealing with traditional Bible stories. The Agony in the Garden has been a subject for religious paintings dating back to at least the 13th century. Biblical and mythological stories have a surprising amount of variation in how they are depicted and reinterpreted by artists of different eras. For this painting, I was specifically looking at Carracci’s Agony in the Garden from about 1590, but also at paintings by Sandro Botticelli’s from 1500 and Adriaen van de Velde from 1665.

…and I was also looking at The Big Lebowski, or course.

The Agony in the Garden Ludovico Carracci - about 1590 Oil on canvas 100.3 cm x 114.3 cm (39.5" x 45") The National Gallery, London

Working within the traditions of genre and narrative as an approach to making paintings may not leave a lot of room for the invention of new forms or for a great deal of formal novelty, but superimposing multiple narratives does seem to allow for divergent and complicated takes on each of the stories.

Looking through western art you can see the number of ways these well worn narratives have been reconfigured, both to communicate older themes to new audiences, and also to use the stories as a leaping off point for other purposes.

I think that in genre and narrative painting, where the structures are a given, whatever is different from the story as it was received by the artist becomes part of the content.

Hopefully, there are a lot of ways to enter the work.

Agony in the Garden Sandro Botticelli 1500 Tempera on panel, 53 x 35 cm Capilla Real, Granada

Agony in the Garden Adriaen van de Velde 1665, oil on canvas, 126 x 154 cm, private collection

Congratulations to Jeff Bridges

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Oath of the Horatii - detail (in progress) • Joe Forkan 2010 oil on canvas 72" x 40

It was great to see Jeff Bridges win the Best Actor Oscar last night for his performance in Crazy Heart, 38 years after his first nomination. I’ve always enjoyed his performances, but my appreciation for his acting has certainly grown since watching The Big Lebowski innumerable times while working on The Lebowski Cycle.

The image above is a detail from The Oath of the Horatii, based on the Jacques-Louis David painting of the same name. The full painting is almost complete and I’ll be posting it soon.

The Lebowski Cycle – The Supper at Emmaus

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Supper at Emmaus (After Caravaggio) • Joe Forkan 2006-2009 oil on linen 96"x 38"

This painting is based on Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus from 1601, which illustrates a dramatic moment from the story of Jesus’ resurrection. I was interested in Caravaggio’s take on the story because of his depiction of the moment of discovery, when the disciple’s “eyes were opened”, and for his symbolic use of the still life to reinforce the central idea of his painting.

Supper at Emmaus Caravaggio 1601 Oil on canvas 141 cm × 196.2 cm (55.5 in x 77.25 in) National Gallery, London

The symbolic references used in the paintings of this time period are somewhat obscure to us now, it is still clear from looking at the work that each figure, element, and gesture was an important consideration in the presentation of the story, all subsumed into the final image. One of the qualities that I most enjoy about narrative painting is that there is a clear story to be presented, but the specific events of the narrative give you great latitude for formal, conceptual or expressive shifts and digressions that can set a different tone or shift the story’s implications.

In my painting, I was looking to create a kind of visual and narrative tension between the figures, the dramatic space, and the still life, one that is suggestive of a larger narrative, and that hopefully moves beyond the specifics of the Jesus story, the Lebowski story, or the Caravaggio story, but retains a shifting, if uneasy relationship between all three, in addition to where I am trying to go with the content and the formal elements.

Detail from the Supper at Emmaus • Joe Forkan 2009

I hesitate to be any more forthcoming about my intentions for these paintings, in that I don’t want to set a specific read for anyone else. Painting is, after all, a language of its own and in this regard, I will let the paintings speak for themselves.

This painting was one of the most complex of The Lebowski Cycle. Its scale was daunting (96″ x 38″ / 243.84 cm x 96.52 cm), with 3 main figures that are slightly over life-size, and a deep space that I wanted to paint in a specific way. I wanted the background to be largely empty, but not in the way that Caravaggio’s paintings are empty, through the use of chiaroscuro (the contrasting effects of intense light and deep shadow). I was looking to represent space and to convey a sense of light and shadow through the relationships of large color shapes, rather than using a more dramatic recession into shadow.

This painting will be included in the Laguna Art Museum‘s exhibition The OsCene 2010 –  Contemporary Art and Culture in Orange County from February 21st – May 16, 2010.

The Lebowski Cycle – The Death of Marat

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The Death of Marat (After David) • Joe Forkan 2008, oil on linen, 96″ x 58″

Begun in 2006, The Lebowski Cycle is a series of paintings exploring the idea of layered narratives, using masterpieces of western art and the 1998 Coen Brothers’ film The Big Lebowski as a starting point. Much of my previous work is figurative, dealing with memory and perception, and walks a line between representation and abstraction, but still I struggled with the idea of making narrative paintings. Film and television have largely overtaken painting as the mediums for narrative approaches, and contemporary painters have largely focused their attentions elsewhere.

Yet I have still found myself moved by paintings that depicted grand story arcs, compressing into a singular image a multitude of thoughts, ideas and emotions. And it wasn’t strictly the stories that interested me. Actually, when looking at narrative art from the Baroque era in particular, I am often more interested in the internal complexities of the images than the specifics of the story represented. The human interaction and conflicts, the formal qualities and modes of depiction give the paintings great breadth and depth and can continue to engage the viewer’s interest over time.

These were challenges I wanted to engage in my work. The formal and conceptual possibilities seemed enormous, but only if the narratives could remain mobile, and the paintings weren’t trapped in a singular reading.

Death of Marat David 250

Death of Marat Jacques-Louis David 1793 Oil on canvas 64 in × 50 in Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels

I began thinking about The Big Lebowski, the 1998 film by Joel and Ethan Coen. In writing the film, the Coen brothers began by constructing of a labyrinthine narrative worthy of a Raymond Chandler novel, and replaced the traditional hardboiled detective character with an aging pothead, turning a genre on its head. This gave them great storytelling possibilities, playing off of and to the conventions of the genre (as well as the conventional take on aging potheads). I’ve always loved this film for its humor, its preposterous story arc, rich visuals, and the way the entire story is played so absolutely straight by the actors.

The film became a screen upon which I could project ideas from a wide range of sources and intensions. By combining narratives, themes, and titles from well-known works of western art with scenes from the film, and ideas and approaches from contemporary art, I found a rich repository of images that informed, overlapped and contradicted each other; ideas to alter, splice together, reconfigure, and run back through the language of painting.

It’s an engaging process. Each painting of the original twelve is at least 72 x 40 inches, painted with oil on linen. My desire was to have the paintings read as a body of work, and I knew that the paintings would diverge stylistically if painted sequentially, so I decided to begin all twelve of the original paintings at once. Four are now completed, the other eight are about 90-95% completed.