#1 (My Father)

When Darrell Brothers started painting in the realist tradition it was both a departure and a return. Brothers, an art professor at Thomas More College in Crestview, Kentucky, began his art career drawing from the model but, throughout the 1950s, preferred to work in a more abstract style. By the early 1960s, he reinstated the figure as the central element in his art. His paintings are elegantly crafted—the artist’s consideration for line, color, and texture seduce the viewer’s attention—though this taste for decorative richness never overwhelmed Brothers’s intent to express emotional depth. He became known for theatrical portraits in which the realistically rendered figure is juxtaposed against a flat backdrop that provides a symbolic context for the portrait, as in #1, Brothers’s last completed painting. The artist’s father, smartly dressed and leaning against a brick wall, is shown before an equally crisp advertisement for Mobil Oil, his longtime employer.