Narrative Painting

A narrative is a story and a narrative painting to me is a painting that tells a story. In many of the narrative paintings that I've been looking at, there are multiple things that support the narrative. As I look around the composition of the painting each thing makes sense, and re-emphasizes the story of the painting. When I first thought about the idea of a narrative painting I thought about the old religious paintings that told religious stories and made the stories of the bible visual. It is like one moment captured in time, or a picture. After thinking about religious paintings I thought about comics, and having one frame after the other giving a sequence of events, which also tells a story. I think that there are many ways to tell a story in a painting, and even on an unconscious level I think that viewers make up their own stories for paintings that weren't even meant to be stories, but since they are possibly a record of a moment in time viewers create in their mind what happened before and after the painting, creating a story for themselves. I think that if the painter wants to make a specific story more obvious it is helpful to have many things in the painting that all lead the viewer to a final story. I was also wondering what it would look like to make a painting that was almost like a collage of comic frames, but seamlessly putting them together into a composition. An anti-narrative is hard for me to define, I know it would be opposite of a story, but I think that almost all paintings have a narrative whether the artist wants it to or not, because the viewer creates the story, not the artist. This makes me think that maybe an artist tries to create an anti-narrative, but maybe it's not possible because of the viewer making up their own story. I'm still not completely sure about it.