"I will preach with my brush"
About this Quote
A painter calling his work “preaching” is a quiet provocation: Tanner isn’t claiming art is decorative, or even merely expressive. He’s claiming it carries a moral charge and a public duty. The phrase is spare and plainspoken, almost Protestant in its economy, and that’s the point. “I will preach with my brush” treats the canvas as a pulpit while sidestepping the institutions that controlled actual pulpits.
The intent is double-edged. Tanner, an African American artist working in a period that policed Black ambition, is staking out authority without asking permission. Preaching implies conviction and an audience; it also implies scrutiny. He’s not painting for private delight but for testimony. That matters in the context of a man who left the United States for France, in part to escape the daily degradations of American racism and the narrowing expectations placed on Black artists. Exile becomes strategy: distance allows him to speak more freely, even when the subject is intimate faith.
Subtext runs through Tanner’s best-known religious scenes: not triumphant pageantry, but reverent realism, ordinary bodies lit with uncommon tenderness. He doesn’t argue doctrine; he stages belief as lived experience, giving spiritual narratives the texture of human vulnerability. The “brush” signals craft, labor, and discipline - a sermon built from observation and technique, not shouting.
It works because it collapses the divide between aesthetics and ethics. Tanner frames painting as a form of witness: not art as escape, but art as a way to insist on dignity, to make viewers look longer, and to feel accountable for what they see.
The intent is double-edged. Tanner, an African American artist working in a period that policed Black ambition, is staking out authority without asking permission. Preaching implies conviction and an audience; it also implies scrutiny. He’s not painting for private delight but for testimony. That matters in the context of a man who left the United States for France, in part to escape the daily degradations of American racism and the narrowing expectations placed on Black artists. Exile becomes strategy: distance allows him to speak more freely, even when the subject is intimate faith.
Subtext runs through Tanner’s best-known religious scenes: not triumphant pageantry, but reverent realism, ordinary bodies lit with uncommon tenderness. He doesn’t argue doctrine; he stages belief as lived experience, giving spiritual narratives the texture of human vulnerability. The “brush” signals craft, labor, and discipline - a sermon built from observation and technique, not shouting.
It works because it collapses the divide between aesthetics and ethics. Tanner frames painting as a form of witness: not art as escape, but art as a way to insist on dignity, to make viewers look longer, and to feel accountable for what they see.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
|---|
More Quotes by Henry
Add to List
