Visual Analysis of a Pictorial Narrative Essay

Narrative painting is a form of literacy where a story is told in the form of a picture. The picture conveys a message, and a viewer can understand what is being communicated by an artist. History paintings involve a painting that concentrates on a serious narrative. A visual narrative can be described as an image that narrates a story (Cortazzi, 2014). Visual is something that can be recognized using human sight while narrative refers to the process of telling a story. For instance, the images narrate stories through scenes.

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All visual narratives are characterized by the presence of a story which can be fiction, folk, fable, religious stories and historical stories. The story being narrated in the third image is about two shepherds. Visual images are constructed with the aim of communicating a story to viewers. Visual narratives must also contain participants. Participants in visual narratives are characters who perform actions. In visual narratives, the story is visual as they mimic real or imaginary universe (Cortazzi, 2014). Characters in visual narratives exist in their world that has different time and spatial dimensions.

A visual narrative can also be expressed in any medium like a wall, paper, stone or an electronic device. Viewers of a visual narrative may be unable to relate the story being communicated by an image due to culture difference, context, and language. For instance, in the first image, the brown fence cannot be easily recognized by an individual coming from a culture embracing concrete walls (Cortazzi, 2014). The pictorial narrative analysis is the methodology used for studying storytelling behaviors.

Without conversations, some guidelines are observed when analyzing or translating a visual narrative. Images represent objects that are identified by distinct characteristics and capture viewers moods by conveying information through colors, symbols, and structures. Painting images or narratives use lines, texture, and shape to link and convey deep structured information (Lapum & Yau, 2015). Analyzing the narrative nature of an image creates an asymmetry between literary and pictorial scenario. If it depicts one event that is recognized and connected to other events.

Visual narratives' artists, designers, and historian have established ways of capturing viewers' attention and keeping them oriented towards a particular direction. Visual narrative introduces a scene with some elements which have different significance throughout the story. Even though it is common to talk about spatial arts, painting, and sculptures, they are all narrative arts. Pictorial artists do not tell stories the way writers do, in fact, they do not narrate completely (Lapum & Yau, 2015). Therefore, pictorial artists narrate stories through by illusions as if they are in words. The modern trend of pictorial artists as a storyteller is vital in painting about history.

Pictorial art narrative is composed of arranged figures in spaces in Renaissance and conflict images implications with temporal characters of a literary narrative. The conflict occurs since the episodes conveyed by a painter or sculptor are not placed in identifiable spaces. There is a basic distinction between graphic image and text. To understand this situation canonical Renaissance should be considered which was written about as painting history (Cortazzi, 2014). Renaissance provides a space in which the artist can distribute his or her figures and characters and suggest the relationship between the image and story. The pictorial narrative composition of figures is conceived well, but the sequence of the story is interrupted by other image considerations like planar and spatial dimensions.

References

Cortazzi, M. (2014). Narrative analysis (Vol. 12). Routledge.

Lapum, J. L., Liu, L., Hume, S., Wang, S., Nguyen, M., Harding, B., ... & Yau, T. M. (2015). Pictorial narrative mapping as a qualitative analytic technique. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 14(5), 1609406915621408.