Art reception and emotional perception of painting

Abstract

The chief objective of this paper is to show in what sense art and emotion can be understood and analyzed on five dimensions. By doing so, this paper not only lays out an organizing categorization to analyze the concepts of art and emotion as understood by major scholars but also introduces an approach to analyzing different kinds of emotional engagement with art works, especially painting. By adopting this five-dimensional approach, the origins of emotion can be traced in the process of art reception. The five dimensions from which emotional engagements take place are the expressed, which is what a painting is meant to say; the dimension of the method, which includes the method, techniques, or approach adopted by a painter to represent the represented; the dimension of the picture, which is the painting itself as an object showing the presented features on the canvas or on a surface as a denotation system presenting the pictorial cues of the painting; the dimension of the unfolding process, carried out by the spectator when unfolding the development of a painting’s pictorial features; and the dimension of the dwelling process, which encompasses the effects or emotions experienced by the spectator as induced in the process of contemplating a painting. The major scholarly works selected in the paper are Ernst Gombrich’s Art and Illusion; Michael Fried’s Absorption and Theatricality; Svetlana Alpers’s The Art of Describing; Norman Bryson’s Vision and Painting; Gilles Deleuze’s Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation; and Nelson Goodman’s Of Mind and Other Matters. These scholarly works bring light to the emotional engagements taking place in the five dimensions.