Give Them Drama

July 27, 2025

Painting is a dramatic act. It is not a polite arrangement of color, nor is it a mere transcription of what the eye sees. To paint is to rupture the stillness of the world with a gesture of inner necessity, not to record nature as it appears, but to transform it into a mirror of something far more elusive. Real painting, true painting, does not seek to imitate the visible but to expose the invisible; it tears away the skin of reality to reveal the pulse beneath.

We often praise paintings for their lifelike qualities, their technical brilliance, their accuracy. But accuracy alone is a cold pursuit. To copy nature is to whisper when you could be shouting, to trace the outline of a storm without tasting the thunder. The artist is not a camera. The artist is a translator, not of form, but of feeling. Nature speaks in shapes, colors, textures. The painter answers in symbols. Not symbols in the overt, metaphorical sense, but in the unique grammar of brushstroke and composition, gesture and tone, a language that comes from somewhere deeper than logic, from a part of the self that resists definition.

Painting is an argument with the void. Every mark is a declaration: I was here, I felt this. It is a wrestle between the known and the unknown, between the surface and what lies beneath it. When you stand before a canvas, what confronts you should not be a placid image but a presence. Something that pushes back. A painting without drama is like a voice without breath, incapable of making you feel anything. It may be technically sound, even beautiful, but beauty without tension is decoration, and decoration is not the purpose of art.

Drama is the lifeblood of painting because it speaks directly to what is human in us: the struggle, the longing, the ache. Whether the subject is a storm at sea or a bowl of fruit, what matters is not the thing itself but the internal reality it reveals. Cézanne’s apples are not apples. They are weight, space, thought. Van Gogh’s skies are not skies. They are pain, hope, and vertigo swirling above a trembling world. In this way, painting becomes a means of translating the psyche into pigment, turning the silent turbulence of the soul into something the eye can perceive.

The canvas is a stage, and every color a character. Every brushstroke is a line of dialogue between the artist and the world, or the artist and themselves. And what the viewer takes away is not a lesson in realism, but an encounter with emotion, raw, distilled, undeniable. Drama is what bridges the gap between the maker and the observer. It is what allows a painting to reach beyond the frame and enter the body of the viewer, not as a fact, but as a feeling.

So give them drama. Not melodrama. Not performance. Give them the truth of what churns inside. Lay bare the tension, the silence that comes before the scream, the moment of rupture, the breath that catches when reality slips into vision. Because in the end, painting is not about what is seen. It is about what is felt,  and there is no feeling without drama.