“Becoming” by Steven DaLuz

                                                            “Becoming” by Steven DaLuz

"The American focus on the sublime continues within work by Steven DaLuz, a great artist from San Antonio, Texas, whose work is firmly in the tradition, yet lifted off from its foundations in the American landscape into an imagined, golden world, in which angelic figures rise from tumultuous seas of gold and chemical patinas. His work is transcendent, rich, and dramatic, and absolutely American.

And if the inauguration of museums is indicative of cultural shifts, then the arrival of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles flags the 21st-century cultural turn toward art for aspirational bourgeois Americans rather than art for an elite baptized by an unholy avant-garde priesthood preaching a political gospel. George Lucas needs no introduction as the iconic creator of the legendary Star Wars series of movies that has provided America with its own great mythical narrative — an allegorical saga equal to the British Lord of the Rings, or the Mahabharata, or “Monkey King,” or the Iliad. The museum’s collection includes examples from American giants in the history of narrative art, including paintings by Bellows, Benton, Dixon, Homer, and Remington. Illustrators, for a century unjustly separated from fine art by the avant-gardists, are returned to the fold, with paintings by Rockwell, Parrish, and Leyendecker offering foundational background to more recent fantasy art by Frazetta, and of course the artwork of Star Wars in concept paintings and set and prop designs.

What are the characteristics of American revolutionary art? Traditional but evolving skill-based technique; connoisseurship; attention to detail; narrative; sentiment; a moral message. These characteristics are found in the paintings and sculptures of the flourishing 21st-century representational art movement.