What is Emotional Art?

What is Emotional Art?

Psychologists today know there are two main types of thinking in the human mind – the logical mind and the emotional mind. The logical mind uses science, mathematics and critical thinking to establish conclusions and reasoning. The emotional mind uses energy, feeling, intuition and deep psychological and subconscious needs to survive to base its human reactions. The overlap of the two, when both minds are in synthesis is called the wise mind.

 

Emotional Art is based solely upon the usage of the emotional mind.  The artist uses his most serious compilation of memory, feeling and drama to release his instinctive passions while in the process of making and creating are. In doing so, his goal is to capture and preserve a raw emotion. Why then is emotional art so difficult to make yet appears so easy and often childish?

Logical art, such as classical realism, landscapes, portraits, etc… are actually a safer road for the artist, because they rely on traditional techniques that once learned and then easy to recreate. Emotional art, on the other hand, ignores craft and technique and focuses solely on human expression. Therefore art becomes illogical and difficult to master with many successes and equal failures.

What are some methods of creating emotional art? Some basics I have found include usage of certain kinds of music, the presence of people, hunger and temperature and even spiritual influences including the bible. Manipulating these factors allows the artist to provoke emotions the same way a method actor prepares for his role. I find the Buddhist practice of mindfulness focusing only on the moment to be extremely helpful as brush painting is to the Chinese a form of meditation.

Some other basics, such as emotionally knowing your colors, brushstrokes, shapes and textures and identifying what they mean to the artist are helpful. The emotional artist, of course, works very rapidly forcing the artist to think in terms of feeling and not science. I often tell my students to write one word about each color, shape or line.  A good beginning exercise is to listen to a song and paint whatever comes to mind. Do this several times with different types of music. Study many emotional artists such as Pollack, DeKooning, Munch and Jasper Johns. Emotional art is a wonderful discipline and recourse to make any artist more creative.