A painter who conveys moral messages in his artwork, Jerome Witkin has "resuscitated narrative painting after the heyday of abstraction." He believes that moral values are as important as formal or aesthetic values ones and "has chosen to make work that deals with human drama." Because his paintings, done exclusively in oil, tend to be laden with narrative figures and symbolic images, he often does diptych, triptychs and polyptychs in cinematic sequences, "to be read from left to right as they unfold in time." Witkin also does paintings that have only personal meaning such as troubled family relationships and observed violence.

Witkin was born in Brooklyn, and his formal art education began when he was age 16 and received a sch...