What is Painting emotions?
Ever since the Renaissance era, emotions were suspect. People, back then, had rediscovered the ancient Greek thinkers and their logic. Art went through a revolution as artists applied mathematical and logical thinking to the creative process. Notions, such as perspective, the Golden Number and reasoned composition, made it possible to give Art a new dimension. Little by little, artists ceased to be artisans and transformed into an intellectual elite. Academic art was born and, for decades ruled the world of creation with its narrow view of what artistic expression had to look like. While this evolution initially represented a fantastic progress, the rigidity of the academic definition of Art gradually became a rigid form of limitation for artistic expression. It’s the impressionist painters, who, at the end of the 19th century, felt excluded and misunderstood by this elite thinking and its narrow frame. Their new way of creating, in “plein air” rather than in a studio, using new techniques and new subjects, very soon got this academic frame burst into pieces.
The human catastrophe of the two world wars, with its load of suffering and absurdities, finished this cultural framework destruction job and ended up centering completely the system on artistic freedom. People like Kandinsky, Picasso, Pollock, Klee, De Kooning and so many others created each one a new view widening. With every limitation they wiped out, our view on art changed drastically. And along with this “cultural revolution” between 1890 and roughly 1960, came a different way of looking at emotions in Art. Emotions no longer were suspect or had to be stylized in order to be shown.
Kandinsky, the (more or less self-proclaimed) inventor of abstract art, claimed that “colors are able to make the human soul vibrate”. I absolutely love this statement, because it is very close to what I experience myself looking at certain paintings. And it’s a very important notion for whoever wants to express feelings through art. Why? Because words can only partially translate emotions, and so do many images that tend to categorize emotional representations. Whereas the term of “soul vibrations” gets pretty close to a good definition and still is wide enough for every individual to translate it to his own personal viewpoint.
Emotions are soul vibrations
Being a physician and a cognitive therapy instructor, I cannot completely erase my knowledge about emotions from my mind. So, I would like to explain what emotions really are and what scientists believe they represent to us, humans.
Neurosciences are rapidly progressing in the understanding of our brain functions including the neuromediators and hormones implicated in emotions. But we are still light years away from an even basic understanding of the way emotions appear and interfere with our daily life. So, the notions and explanations I will give in what follows are based on behavioral studies and might be reconsidered differently in the future. But, still, they give a pretty good viewpoint of their general functioning and thus will help explain my personal approach in my artwork.
Simply said, emotions are catalyzers or boosters for our reactions to stress situations or in our social interactions. They are part of the processes guiding our behavior in response to a stimulus received from our environnement. The 2 other ingredients being thoughts and physical sensations. I wrote about this in another paper some time ago and if the question interests you there are a few books that explain this better than I will (Prof.Pierre Philippot & Prof.R.S.Feldman). For the sake of my explanations, let’s just say this: our emotions, our physical sensations and our thoughts are very much influenced by the culture we share and the education we get from our parents and the school system. By thoughts I do not mean are capacity for logical thinking and comprehension, but all those thousands of automatic thoughts appearing every second in our minds. You know all these little ideas like “I shouldn’t have said this”, “she will think I’m an idiot”, “I’m sure this guy doesn’t like me”, “I’m stupid”, “I’ll never make it”, … They might seem harmless since they belong to us, like our head or our hands, but in fact :
- they represent something like 95% of our thinking
- they usually are totally subconscious,
- they interfere with absolutely every action we make during are day.
Now here we are with an immensely important brain process, that commands almost everything we do, and we are most of the time absolutely not aware of it. These automatic thoughts are held for responsable for the relapses in chronic depression (Prof.Mark Williams) and they just as much make us think we have no talent for painting, writing and so on. They are therefore the basic element you learn to get aware of in mindfulness and especially in Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy. But, that’s not really the subject here.
How do automatic thoughts interfere with our creativity?
The answer is as easy as taking a pencil and a piece of paper and giving you the task of drawing the portrait of the person in your mirror. For most of us, as soon as we get started, automatic thoughts will appear saying mainly negative things about our ability to make it happen.
All of these automatic thoughts are judgmental.
That means they influence our activity by judging it and pushing us either to try harder or to quit. Now when it comes to creativity there are at least two aspects to consider:
- the emotional impact it has on yourself
- the reactions it may trigger in your public
For many artists the second aspects seems to be the most important to be considered. But it really should be secondary.
No artist can exist all by himself. No matter if you make music, write poems or paint, you need to show your work to others. Otherwise, it’s as if you didn’t exist as a creative. That’s why the second aspect, our public’s reactions to our work, seems so important. I definitely think that’s a mistake. Trying to be creative according to what we believe the public expects, or what we think will make them react positively, is a mousetrap in the long run. Sooner or later, you’ll realize that your work has become fundamentally fake and based on pre-existing patterns. The same type of pattern, our automatic thoughts follow, influenced as they are by education, culture, ideologies.
Now, following these patterns doesn’t mean you cannot be successful in your art. 90% of the art sold does actually follow them, more or less. But, when it comes to consider the first aspect I mentioned, the emotional impact of your work on yourself, it may be responsable of a rude awakening one day. I’ll even push it further and say that the people we consider the masters of art, Picasso, Van Gogh, Matisse, you name it, were probably people who privileged this first aspect by war more than the second. How else could you explain the evolution they went through during their career? The positive public reactions followed. Unfortunately for some, like Vincent van Gogh, decades later.
Now, please don’t think I have the pretentiousness to dare comparing myself in any way to anyone of those masters, but I too privilege this first aspect. Simply because it makes me happy. I don’t sell any of my work (at least not until now), but I try as much as i can not to consider the marketing aspect of my artwork. This wasn’t always so. When I first started, I very often felt stressed by what I thought of as the meager quality of my stuff. I didn’t even believe people who told me they liked it, putting their positive opinion on the account of politeness. And after a while, I realized that what should have brought me satisfaction and pride, really made me feel awkward and anxious. The cause of this negative impact was easy to find: the fault was on my automatic thoughts, my subconscious auto-criticism.
Intuition and self-awareness as factors of creative freedom
Now it’s one thing to know about the fact that our automatic thoughts hinder our creative activity and liberty, but it’s another to change that situation. Telling yourself to change, inventing fake habits or even trying to ignore them just doesn’t work. The good news is that it is in fact easier than you think to “free yourself” from the impact of automatic thoughts. Cognitive behavioral specialists have quickly found out that the sheer fact of becoming aware of them, breaks most of the impact these mind patterns have on us. The real problem is that this awareness is neither easy to obtain, nor permanent.
So, that means, if you want to take benefit of this knowledge you need to take 2 actions:
- learn how to become aware of the mechanism
- apply this awareness constantly to your work
The learning process I went through was mindfulness training. In fact I even became a MBCT instructor.
Mindfulness is actually a tremendous way to train your self-awareness and to learn how to recognize these subconscious mechanisms. I won’t go through all the different aspects of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s program, but its main effect is just that: awareness of our thoughts, sensations and emotions. And that’s why it’s perfect for my thesis. Because once you know how to recognize them, then you can train to apply this knowledge to your creative processes. In other words, being aware of the judgmental thoughts arising when we create, it gets easy to modify their impact, simply by using a few easy counteractions.
If you encounter limitations go beyond them.
As soon as you start following any rule in your creative activity, may it be perspective, proportion, color harmony or whatsoever, you rapidly find yourself limited by these rules. Nobody can follow them perfectly. So, how can you go beyond these self-imposed limitations? Simply by forcing your way.
And by forcing your way I mean just that. As soon as you see anything in your work that seems wrong, not according to the rules, not straight or out of the aim, simply scratch it, cover it up with mud, erase it. Oh, at first, that’s not easy, because your automatic thoughts will fire up like machine guns saying “are you crazy?”, “you’re making things worse”, “you’re acting like a stubborn child”, … but in the end you’ll find the result liberating.
What’s left when you decide not to follow the rules, not to limit your creativity? What red line can you follow then?
INTUITION
Yes, what’s left and can guide you is your intuition. That’s what people like De Kooning did in the 50s. Let things go wild, over the limits. See how far you can go, how far you can follow your intuition. And, as I already mentioned, those automatic thoughts will come back as soon as you stop scanning your mindset. That’s why training moment to moment awareness is so important in this working process. But at the end of the day you will probably find that your efforts were worthwhile.
What I personally discovered for my own creativity was the obtention of an unsuspected liberty. It’s that freedom that brought back satisfaction and even happiness to my work as a painter.
I also found out that what I really do now is expressing emotions in a complete new manner. The impact my paintings have on myself is the only criteria I consider when I paint. And many times I don’t have words to describe the emotions I go through, while looking at them. I just feel it. Applying self-awareness to my work simply made it easy to practice self-kindness and thus recover from the stress situations I went through before.
There are new color combinations I discover, new compositions, new expressions. They don’t follow any rule, they just appear before my eyes. And it feels great. My artistic horizons just widen up more and more. Ans as they do so, I can now come back to figurative painting, without any rule slowing me down. The joy of creating something I like is good enough for me.
Did I get rid of my automatic thoughts? Hell, no. And I know I never will, but using the self awareness training, I mentioned above, their impact on me is not as heavy any more. And, most of all, they don’t stop me any more from expressing my emotions. By the way, the fact that the emotions I express now are not fitted to those automatic mind patterns is probably the explanation for why I often can’t find words to describe them. They are genuinely authentic!
I paint emotions and I enjoy doing so.
