IN ART CIRCLES, there's a lot of talk about emotion. The painter is driven to a final result by feelings. Fellow painters tell each other they sensed the "deep emotion" of one another’s artworks. In the advice department, a painter will occasionally instruct others how to capture emotion in a work.
Clearly, human nature has some kind of aesthetic emotion, a response to imagery. From there, it becomes a labyrinth of complexity.
One way to sort out this Holy Grail (since, presumably, the right emotion can produce an excellent artwork, or the right emotion can spur a viewer to admire or buy your painting), is to compare art emotion with other kinds.
To state an extreme, think of the tearful emotion of a Pentecostal church gathering, or red-faced emotion of a thousand sports fans at a crucial moment—and then compare that with an art museum or art-show opening. There's no comparison, obviously. If a few hundred people in an art museum are experiencing deep personal catharsis, they certainly aren't showing it.
I've heard of very demonstrative cases of art emotion. At an art conference, a woman painter told a large audience of how her life changed one day when, sitting in a museum, looking at a particular painting, she "cried for eight hours." Hmm. More believable, one art professor, a very virile guy, told me of how tears came to his eyes at a van Gogh exhibit.
So, what's going on here?
Back to the comparisons with all emotions. Researchers of human feeling have traditionally come up with four to seven basic human emotions. A wrench was thrown into that theory when a recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences said that an in-depth look at how 800 subjects responded to a wide array (about 2,000) short video images fell into 27 different emotions. Not only did many emotions overlap, but some of the more basic ones (the four to seven) did not show up in self-describing interviews of the subjects.
Meanwhile, whole books have been written about the roots of the emotion of beauty. Some say it is rooted composition, color, or sentiment (memory), and others say sex (of course!). Tolstoy, writing on art, said beauty is conveyed by the artist to the viewer. In that sense, painters feel that a particular painting has achieved an overall “effect” that “works,” and other people will feel it. Postmodernist theory, to the contrary, says the viewer brings a subjective sense of beauty to whatever is being seen (and the artist's intent plays no role; in post-mod literature, it’s called the “authorless” work).
In another field, medial biologists have found a phenomenon call "color synethesia." Physically, this emotional state happens to people whose visual nerves intertwine with their limbic (emotional) nerve system. When they see certain colors, or combinations, emotions well up.
In a more traditional past, emotion was held suspect. Recall Plato's famous image of the chariot rider (reason) controlling the wild horse of emotion and will. For that extreme, think of emotionless Stoics or Samurai. In the Christian world, high emotion was associated with contact with the Creator. Indeed, the emotion of beauty was taken to be recognition of God's ineffable creativity (color, balance, proportion, surprise, magnitude, and the all the rest).
Our secular times may be different, though we've always have to currents of emotionalism and antinomianism; and, it seems, most everyone has sought a moment of transcendence, a release from the tensions or confusion of mundane life (i.e. the emotion of sheer relief). The famed American psychologist William James posited that enjoyable emotions spring from release from bodily or mental tension, which he found to be the normal human state.
Looking at the “27-emotions theory,” most of them might bear directly on a painter's life and on how viewers respond to artworks. They have a light and dark side:
Light: Admiration, Adoration, Aesthetic Appreciation, Amusement, Awe, Calmness, Entrancement, Excitement, Interest, Joy, Nostalgia, Romance, Satisfaction, Sexual Desire, Sympathy, and Triumph.
Dark: Anxiety, Awkwardness, Confusion, Disgust, Envy, Sadness
For the viewers of art, many of these would arise from memory (as in nostalgia or sadness), while others suggest strong reactions to over-the-top imagery (confusion, disgust, sexual desire). For the painter's part, the motive to paint evokes memory, but also more practical emotions: amusement, envy (of other artists), excitement, interest, satisfaction, and triumph.
I have to admit that it's beyond me what emotions a viewer feels in seeing particular paintings, or what other painters must be feeling as they grapple with a project.
I admit a tendency to enter the world of liquid emotion with certain movies, novels, real events or inter-family reckonings within friendships and family. But I’ve never felt liquid emotion looking a painting. A typical guy, or a stunted emotion? I don’t know.
However, a few common sentiments seem quite normal in all people. One would be simply delight in the art, and another would be an appreciation (or surprise) at what can be done with the skilled use of paint. Paintings always evoke memories of past life (or other great art), and so sentiment plays a role. And yes, when painters are successful, it’s not hard to see the look of emotional "triumph" on their faces.
And, despite all the philosophical and scientific hair splitting, there probably is something called overwhelming beauty—transcendent and biological. In short, the overwhelming universe from which we have emerged is presented to us, as Charles Darwin put it, in "endless forms most beautiful," or as Edmund Burke put it, as the sweet terror of “the sublime.” But eight hours of crying? I don't know.
larrywithamfineart@gmail.com