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I wonder how many art jokes have been made of that idiom?  It’s kind of ironic when you think about it because in order to make a joke about it, you have to strip it of its idiomatic quality and assign literality to it. Nonetheless, I’m less than a hundred words into this post and I’m off into the weeds not having said anything meaningful really.

I guess what’s been on my mind lately relative to painting is how representational art, I mean really good representational art should say something.  There should be a narrative.  After all, art is a form of expression and I think it should convey more than just a pleasing set of color or an interesting texture.  I guess that’s why I’m not all that big a fan of abstract art. What does it say anyway?  Perhaps I’m looking at this with too narrow a lens, but that’s just me.  If you don’t agree, that’s ok. I digress once again.

I think the narrative is more easily seen in representational paintings – especially those with a human element.  We humans are the story tellers, after all.  When we see a figure in a painting we begin to imagine who this person could be, what they are thinking or doing or how it might feel to walk in their shoes or live in their era of time.  Paintings with a house, we imagine who might live there and what they might have been doing when the painting was made. A road, a fence, a car or a boat all give us pause to think about its relationship to the environment and the humans who had something to do with them. 

Paintings with animals, domestic or wild, tell a story pretty easily as well. They are living beings depicted on the canvas and we can easily imagine their circumstances. Coming, going, eating, sleeping, playing, fighting, etc.

“Ah, but what of the landscape?” you may ask, “where is the narrative there?” I would argue there is one. An old tree greeting the sun each morning as it rises over the eastern horizon, day after day, season after season. The rock formation or the mountain range there depicted.  How did it form?  What living things live in or around it?  The stream, from where does it spring and to where does it run?  The landscape can be evocative too, stirring within a sense of place.

Now, are these narrative thousand-word narratives?  Likely not. In reality, they are probably zero-word narratives.  You see, while I believe there’s a narrative behind a good representational painting, I don’t think it’s necessarily understood with so many words.  That’s why humans invented language and writing, to tell stories with literal precision.  The stories conveyed by representational art are seen and understood on a different level. A deeper and more universal level I maintain. The best kind of painting, I think, stirs the soul of the viewer and can bring tears to the eyes and joy to the heart. Meaning is not hard to draw from these sorts of paintings, but words often are.

I probably have yet to paint works such as I’ve been describing, but I have so striven and continue to.  There are many artists, both living and dead who have painted such masterful work with regularity.  I encourage you, to spend time immersing yourself in really great art and let the narrative of it speak to your soul.  In this day and age, it’s easier to do than ever. 

So, what’s to be done with the idiom?  If the narrative is told in a non-verbal way, where do the thousand words come in?  I guess that’s the beauty of words, we can say things that aren’t literal with them as easily as we can say things that are. We can even make a word like “idiom” to describe it!  Here’s my suggestion: so far, my word processor tells me I’ve written less than a thousand words (less than 680) to this point. So, however long it’s taken you to read this, a thousand words would have taken you a bit longer.  I suggest that you take a similar amount of time looking at one really great painting. And I don’t mean blankly staring, but looking at the narrative, what’s it about and how the artist masterfully conveyed it through his brushstrokes and choice of color and composition. Let it soak into the fiber of your being a bit and enjoy it!  Art really does make life better, and in less than a thousand words, how marvelous is that?