WHERE ART THOU HEART VISUAL LANGUAGE

Jennifer Scott, Director, Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

reative expression through nar-

Crative storytelling is a powerful tool for fighting oppression and breaking through indifference. Few artists are willing to go against the grain and use their compositions to interrogate the darkest parts of human nature. Attempts are made to silence social activism, and only a handful of artists take a stand in verbal and visual commentary.

My artwork embraces empathy and the power of the human spirit to rise above natural disasters, disease, poverty, and wars. My paintings and drawings are a visual language that far too often falls on deaf eyes. I now create with an urgency to awaken minds before it is too late. People always ask me why the majority of my work centers on birth, love, and death. I suppose the answer is that grappling with these themes helps me to understand the impermanence of life on this planet. When an artist paints from the heart they are usually isolated or ostracized because society and the viewer find the work to be too brutally honest and hard to ingest.

The fear of rejection from galleries and collectors is undeniable. I have dealt with it firsthand, and I know artists who fear losing their income if they shock the public or upset the viewer with a composition whose subject matter challenges the norm. Even my fellow educators fear that schools will fire them or create consequences for participating in marches and taking a public stance on issues of social or environmental justice. They make “safer” paintings and sculptures that conform, such as simple portrait or landscape work. While these pieces are valuable and relevant, they fit a genre separate from that of activism artwork, which initiates a dialogue of change. I believe as painters we have moral and ethical obligations to document the truth of our world and our hearts.

I have been showing my work professionally for almost thirty years in galleries and museums. As an illustrator, film concept artist, gallery artist, curator, and art historian I have seen my art featured in over 120 novels, numerous magazines, and movies. I am also a teacher and adjunct

Left: A Painting by Jeremy Caniglia

© Caniglia professor on the high school and collegiate level. I teach drawing, painting, printmaking, sculpture, and filmmaking. I take time to lecture at galleries, universities, and schools, as well as for community outreach programs. My lectures explain how I use painting as a visual language to tell stories. Specifically, I explain how my painting is activism, addressing wars, climate change, and educating the public on the importance preserving our natural world.

It is a mistake, however, to assume that the viewing public is complacent. Caravaggio, Giuseppe de Ribera, Artemisia Gentileschi, Francisco Goya, Käthe Kollwitz, and my teacher Odd Nerdrum among others, were willing to refrain from “prettifying” or embellishing the human condition and instead exposed its darkest realities. The timelessness of their work can be measured in increasing demand for it, both in collections and as seen in viewership numbers at museum shows. That timelessness is anchored by the simple fact that beauty is not the only archetype of relevance to painting, nor even the most important. Others, such as pathos and ethos, imbue art with greater meaning, a fact that the aforementioned artists understood explicitly and that the public does implicitly.

Archetypes referencing despair, sorrow, and death are more than simply grotesque. Rather, they force a light upon the deep shadows of our complicated world, forcing us to confront fear of and complacency toward unseen tragedies occurring every day. The future depends on our action to right wrongs sprung from apathy and greed. Art can play an essential role in combating those vices, but if it is beautiful without simultaneously being brutal, it furthers the complacency that leads society away from the warnings of scientists and experts and towards vacuous promises of a poorly remembered past.

We must recognize that painting is not all beauty and life is not always beautiful.

Having said that, though, we must also recognize that beauty need not be found at some vantage far removed from the harsh realities of life. Rather, seeing the beauty in the struggles we face and looking for light in the darkness that can surround us helps us create an understanding of who we are and what we are about. This exercise gets to the heart of the central questions of the painter’s profession: Why does an artist create? Can we truly create a painting if we have nothing to say with it? Are we capable of giving ourselves to something even if we do not fully understand it?

These are some of the questions that have been the driving force behind my narratives.

As I mentioned, most of my work explores climate change, wars, revolution, poverty, and endangered species. It takes an anti-establishment perspective. I began using my artwork in the late ’80s and early ’90s to confront issues of universal concern. My deep commitment to human rights, social justice, and biodiversity has never swayed. I find strength in civil disobedience.

In 1986, at the age of 16, I went to the Civic Auditorium in Omaha, Nebraska, to see a man who brought a message of peace, atonement, and human dignity for all through his political activism. His name was Elie Wiesel. He had just won the Nobel Peace Prize and was on a small tour. I listened to this man, who was so humble that he didn’t even want his award. I remember how sad his voice was, and yet also how uplifting. His words would inspire me for the rest of my life. He spoke about teen suicide, and against violence, repression, and racism. He said that it was up to us to be the change we want and need in this world, and that no one would help us.

In the early ’90s, I was in a punk industrial band that pushed for social justice in the inner cities. I toured through the Midwest and created visual graphics for each show that brought awareness to issues I did not see anybody talking about. Inspired by Elie Wiesel, I participated in marches for those who were marginalized. I continue to advocate and attend social justice marches, but now with my children. I want them to understand and take a stand on matters that are important to them and our natural world.

In the mid ’90s, I moved to the East Coast and lived in Baltimore, Maryland, during graduate school. My work and activism changed, and I spoke through my paintings about the inequality, racism, and injustice that I witnessed on the streets.

One of my paintings, Welcome to America, made the front page of the Washington Post on July 14, 1994. It was the first time I realized the power of art. My artwork and the issues I addressed reached a wider audience and served a higher purpose by raising awareness.

In 1998, Odd Nerdrum, a fellow painter that I greatly admired, declared that he was no longer an artist, but rather a “kitsch painter.” Disillusioned with modernist ideas that he saw as absurdist and that fostered apathy and ego in artistic expression, Nerdrum embraced his association with the technical skills of the Old Masters and sought to use their trade to render empathy on his canvases. Nerdrum could not have cared less what society thought of him, and he embraced largescale narratives full of timeless archetypes.

I would eventually find my path to Røvik Gård and study with Odd Nerdrum personally. Beyond what he taught me technically, Nerdrum also left me with the lesson that—whether we are called kitsch, grotesque, dark, or low brow—narrative storytellers are painters searching for sentimentality. He showed me that this is an honorable pursuit, and that I should never apologize for being genuine.

In a masterpiece, time and place are captured so vividly that a viewer is moved to the moment, to joy or sorrow more than tears. A masterpiece lifts a veil, exposing the heartstrings of life—it allows those heartstrings to resonate and reverberate in the depths of the human condition.

In our less than picture perfect world, finding an artist who can draw inspiration from life’s oddities, struggles, and melancholy is rare. Painters who can find meaning in this world’s oppression and also have technical training in narrative storytelling is even more uncommon. Even for the few who possess both, issues showing their work arise because few venues exhibit work labeled “kitsch painting,” “imaginative realism,” or “dark art.”

It was around 2000–2005 that my artwork started to shift again. At that time, I would often take my children to the botanical gardens, and I was studying the diversity of plants and insects. On one visit, I was in a huge pollinator section with a variety of butterflies and, all of sudden, they began landing on only my son and daughter. It was a magical moment because I noticed that they were not landing on the adults. I had an idea for a painting that I called Birth of Spring, with butterflies kissing the innocence of youth. The glow depicted in the painting was the love and empathy that came from our natural world.

Around this same time, my art started to bring awareness to the monarch popu-

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lation that was (and still is) in an historic decline. I decided that I would paint a new series of butterfly pieces. One of the paintings was of a butterfly that was tied to a brick. I called the piece A luminous, fluttering melody tethered to a dystopian dream. The idea was that no matter how bad the apathy in our world becomes, dreamers are still willing to fight and overcome obstacles no matter how daunting they may seem. The monarch represents the mysteries of the soul: love, death, and rebirth. It is a symbol of transition and hope. In my work, I portrayed the monarch as having the ability to lead us out of the darkness, confinement, and restraints of oppression and into the light. From 1996 to 2010, my art and activism started to get more organized. I realized that I was getting better at portraying and talking about the issues that I was passionate about. I began to put all my efforts into my narrative storytelling. In 2022, I have found that our world is at a tipping point with climate change. Our natural world has been compromised by politicians and corporate greed. The mechanics of destruction and the gears of war are now a felt reality and have devasted families in the Middles East, Africa, and now in the Ukraine. Everything has been affected. The planet is still warming at an alarming rate, wiping out important pollinator populations and causing massive biodiversity loss. With so much at risk and on the verge of extinction, we need to come together as good citizens, environmentalists, and art activists to make the change we seek.

The fact is, if we are going to save the world we love, protect its biodiversity, and humankind, we need to come together in solidarity and fight for a better tomorrow. There is no longer room for indifference and standing on the sidelines. Even though our society will deny the reality of climate change, I have found common ground in our communities’ efforts to initiate change—especially those concerning pollinators. It seems everyone is willing to rally around bees and butterflies, which are a universal symbol in art and the cycle of life.

My narrative paintings are created from the mud of my palette with muted, earthen, neutral colors depicting a blend of detailed realism and emotional distance filled with pathos. My work strives to grant agency to the poor and downtrodden. I give strength to those who have no voice and hope my work becomes a call to action to the contemporary public and those willing to listen.

We do not live in a vacuum . . . in lightness of emptiness, mindless men rattle words and sabers frantically bumping into one another seeking some way to exist together on earth. They do not know what they are looking for since they are blind to one another. Most think they have the answers and definition of what this world is about, but they are clueless to the multiple truths that exist. As Odd Nerdrum told me, “If you think you have the definition right then you are part of the stupidity.” The people on top and in control realize that the human mind . . . the storytellers are the most dangerous enemy, and it is these minds that they must oppress and destroy before they shine light on the truth and lies that wait for us in the shadows. The governments, corporations, and art critics wait in the wings like wolves watching for our one misstep so they can pounce on us and take us.

Art activism can come in many forms. Ask yourself what role you could play. Maybe you are a writer and could send an editorial to your local newspaper discussing climate change, poverty, or global wars; or maybe you are a photographer and could take photos of biodiversity and animal struggles with climate change. Perhaps, you are an art activist like me that could use visual narratives for change. We are the light for the human condition and need to fight for a better and brighter tomorrow. ●