Best Painting Show

Baroque artists such as Caravaggio and Artemisia Gentileschi were the cinematographers of their day, using dramatic shadows and light within a composition to help tell a story. Four hundred years later, Bruce Erikson, a painter and former professor of art at Washington University in St. Louis, uses the same tricks of the trade, creating characters and playing out scenes on large oil canvases. His exhibition last winter at William Jewell College's Stocksdale Gallery lacked the sensational "conversion of saints" or "beheading of kings" themes common to the Baroque movement, projecting instead grandiose narratives on scenes of today's routine activities.