Feelings of a person in a painting. The influence of the painting on the emotional mood of a person Paintings expressing feelings
Psychophysiology of painting:
why impressionist paintings evoke emotions in us
Text: Maria Smirnova / Illustration: Pierre Auguste Renoir
In the mass consciousness, the scientific - or rationalistic - type of thinking is usually opposed to the creative one. In fact, science and art are much closer together than it seems at first glance. For example, the effect that the works of impressionist artists produce on a person can be explained not only in art history terms, but also in the context of the main categories of systemic psychophysiology. How to do this, told T&P Yuri Aleksandrov, Doctor of Psychology, Professor, Head of the Laboratory of Psychophysiology named after V.B. Shvyrkov Institute of Psychology, Russian Academy of Sciences.
“The artist depicted us // Deep faint of lilac // And sonorous steps of colors // He put on the canvas like scabs // He understood the thickness of the oil, - // His baked summer // Warmed up with a purple brain, // Expanded into stuffiness” - this is how he described the creative method of impressionism in 1932, Osip Mandelstam, in the very first couplet of the poem dedicated to the painting by Claude Monet "Lilac in the sun", remarked extremely precisely how the painting of the Impressionists differs from the painting of their predecessors. The impressionist artist not only depicts a lilac branch, but seeks to convey the impression it makes on him.
One of the key tasks of Impressionism was the departure from the detailed photographic nature of realism. It was assumed that by eliminating photographicity, painters would be able to bring the experience, the subjectivity of reflection into the picture. Not to add from scratch, of course, but to add. Photographing is also partly subjective: the photographer decides where to point the lens, what moment to capture.
Claude Monet. "Lilac in the sun"
Looking at the paintings of the Impressionists, one involuntarily asks the question: how did the artists manage to put so much emotion into their works? Although, perhaps, it would be more accurate to ask what exactly happens to a person and his inner, subjective world when he looks at the canvases of Monet, Renoir, Degas? How did the Impressionists manage to display their emotions so vividly that they are effectively transmitted to the observer? What happens in the subjective world of the observer when getting acquainted with impressionist painting? To answer these questions, you need to understand how the subjective world works, and for this, you need to find out how it is formed and what place emotions occupy in it.
“Our subjective world is formed through interactions with the external environment,” says Yuri Iosifovich. - These interactions begin in the womb and continue throughout life. Traces of such interactions, stored in memory, are the systems formed in the process, or elements of the subjective world - the models of the relationship between the individual and the environment. If a person needs to repeat an interaction, the corresponding model is activated, that is, it is retrieved from memory. The newly formed models do not replace the ones formed earlier, at the previous stages of life, but are added to them. Thus, the memory of an individual can be compared to geological layers. One of the most famous Russian psychologists, Lev Vygotsky, considered the idea that the structure of behavior, in some respects, reminiscent of the geological structure of the earth's crust, was extremely fruitful. Memory can also be compared to the annual rings of a tree, only each ring here is not a trace of the past year, but of new learning. The more we learn, the more rings we have in our memory.
The memory of the earliest interactions is preserved throughout life and affects the behavior, feelings of the individual, and his decision-making. At the same time, he often cannot express in words, or, as experts say, “declare” the presence of memory material, tell himself or others about that episode of his life before birth or in early childhood, thanks to which this system-model appeared. Apparently, this impossibility belongs to a completely normal phenomenon, which is called "infantile amnesia" - forgetting the events of childhood. "
Edgar Degas. "Rehearsal", 1873
However, there are exceptions: some people can recall memories of the earliest events in their lives. The famous work of the founder of Russian neuropsychology, Alexander Luria, "A Little Book of Great Memory" describes the case of Solomon Shereshevsky, the owner of a phenomenal memory, a professional mnemonist. Shereshevsky recalls: “I perceived my mother as follows: before I began to recognize her, it’s good.” There is no form, no face, there is something that bends over and from which it will be good ...<…> - this is a cloud, then a pleasant one ... "
And here is how Andrei Bely reproduces his early feelings that are a little over two years old in his book At the Turn of Two Centuries: “Imagine your consciousness<…> somewhat relaxed<…>but not extinct at all; I<…> experiencing the objective reality of the room<…> like a fish living in an aquarium in a room; Imagine this fish as a child who is conscious of himself, and you will understand that reality is presented to him as through the depth of water. " Thus, in the early stages of development, the world is perceived by a person not in details, but vaguely, vaguely, emotionally.
“The fact is that the formation of new systems in the process of individual development allows us to relate more and more differentiatedly to the environment, to build our behavior taking into account an increasing number of details,” explains Yuri Iosifovich. - For example, being in the womb, the fetus provides the flow of maternal blood and, consequently, nutrients and oxygen to the placenta, making a variety of movements. After birth, for the same general "metabolic" goal, it becomes necessary to perform specialized movements: breathing in order to receive oxygen, sucking movements, grasping the nipple of the mother's breast (or nipple) in order to receive food. Then it turns out that, in addition to milk, you can get, for example, juice from a spoon, and for this you need to make drinking movements, gripping the spoon with your mouth. Then it turns out that you can eat solid food that you need to chew. You can also eat from a cup or plate. With the help of different devices, different food, making different types of movements and focusing on different properties of this food, determined visually, smelling, tactile, to taste. Subsequently, a person discovers that food can be obtained not only at home, but also at school, in a cafe, on the street, at a party, and receiving it includes a number of specific preparatory actions and taking into account many factors: for example, if you have free money , and in the cafe - free seats.
"Paintings of the Impressionists, devoid of photographic, realistic accuracy, refer to evolutionarily more ancient systems that were formed early in individual development."
It is important to note the following: experiments with recording the activity of individual brain cells - neurons - show that when we carry out a relatively complex food-processing behavior (for example, eat in a cafe), we activate not only those highly differentiated "food" systems that were formed at the first visits to catering outlets, but also - at the same time - those that were formed at the previous, including the earliest stages of development.
If at the first stages of development the individual (both man and animal) splits the world roughly (into objects and phenomena pleasant and unpleasant, those that one wants to approach, or those that one wants to avoid), then over time it turns out that pleasant and unpleasant - varied, as well as the ways of dealing with it. The relationship with the environment at the minimum level of differentiation is described by a number of researchers in terms of "emotions" or "emotionally-like perceptions." In connection with these ideas, many authors, starting with Charles Darwin, noted that emotions, including their facial expressions, arise already at the earliest stages of development, already in the fetus. And of course, babies have them, including those born prematurely. "
Naturally, an adult also has emotions, who comes to the museum to look at Monet's "Water Lilies" and instead of looking for details - as he would most likely do, standing in front of Bosch's canvas, or admire the skillfully created balance of color and shade, what usually happens when looking at Rembrandt's paintings, or trying to mentally list the names of all the fruits in a vase, which he would most likely do if he saw an allegorical portrait of Archimboldo's brush, is left to the will of the senses.
Claude Monet. From the series "Water Lilies", 1917-1919
It is interesting, by the way, that, almost a century ahead of the publication of this material, Mandelstam in the above poem also used gastronomic images, as if connecting the impressionist paintings with the process of eating with a dotted line: “And the shadow, the shadow is all purple, // Whistle il the whip goes out like a match. // You say: the cooks in the kitchen // They cook fat pigeons. " The last couplet, on the one hand, sharply reduces the poet's sublime, inspired tone: the mysterious purple shadow is replaced by prosaic fat pigeons. On the other hand, it becomes an attempt to give a voice to either the characters in Monet's painting, or to the invisible interlocutor of the lyric hero of the poem. And, finally, with the third, it appeals to the emotions of the reader-viewer: the idea of \u200b\u200bfatty, heavy food causes disgust, a desire to avoid eating it. In the same way, impressionist painters appeal to the emotions of the viewer - quite rarely, however, depicting disgusting objects and phenomena.
Emotions, according to Yuri Iosifovich, to a greater extent characterize the activation, retrieval from memory of precisely those systems that were formed at the earliest stages of individual development, corresponding to a rather rough, indefinite fragmentation of the world and our interaction with it: good - bad, sad - joyful, I want to get closer - I want to avoid. Consciousness is more associated with the activation of more differentiated systems that correlate us with the world of details and provide a huge variety of behavioral models that directly depend on these details. I understand that it is good, and I want to get closer, but how to do it? I understand that it is bad and I want to avoid it, but how? Figuratively speaking, the activation of the "old" systems helps us to choose the right action from the piggy bank of approximations and avoidances, and the activation of the "new" systems gives an answer to the question "how?" - what method of approach or avoidance to choose in this particular case, taking into account certain circumstances.
A fleeting scene, snatched by Monet's eye from everyday life, seems to be separated from the viewer by a veil of misty haze, and it is she who emotionally involves and refers us to the earliest ideas about the world order
“Not only sound streams, but also images can be decomposed into frequencies - high and low, - continues Yury Iosifovich. - Moreover, when we talk about images, an increase in the representation of higher frequencies in the frequency description of a picture corresponds to an increase in image detail. Well, this is to simplify. There are experiments in which participants are shown images - such as photographs - using high-pass or low-pass filters. That is, as if by alternately subtracting these frequencies from the image. It turned out that if you subtract higher frequencies, details, the participants in the experiment cannot say who this person is, identify him, but they can tell what emotion his facial expressions express. And vice versa: if you subtract low frequencies, then the participants can identify the person, but they cannot make judgments about what emotions he is currently experiencing.
In the course of these experiments, the researchers analyzed the brain activity of the participants when viewing images, and it turned out that low frequencies are associated with the rapid, rough, emotional assessment of images, which is provided by the activity of evolutionarily old brain structures: they are formed in the early stages of individual development - at the same time when they are formed. poorly differentiated systems. The high frequencies characterizing the details of the image are associated with a slow discrete analysis of the visual picture, which is provided by the activity of evolutionarily newer structures that are formed at later stages of individual development. That is, at the stages when more differentiated systems are being formed.
Mandelstam finishes his poem with a stanza: "A swing is guessed, // Veils are not dimmed, // And in this gloomy collapse // A bumblebee is already in charge." Details - a swing, veils - are insignificant for the creative method of impressionism, and the faces of the women depicted in Monet's painting "Lilac in the Sun" are blurred and unclear. We cannot say anything about their age or their social status, which would play an important role in the analysis of, say, Vermeer's painting. A fleeting scene, snatched by Monet's eye from everyday life, seems to be separated from the viewer by a veil of foggy haze, and it is this haze that emotionally draws us into what is happening in the picture and refers to the earliest ideas about the world order.
Expressionism is an art that expresses feelings.- Once I felt a real catharsis in the painting by Vincent Van Gogh "The Van Gogh Chair" at the National Gallery in London. I really love Van Gogh for his color, roughness and vitality. There is a lot of life and a lot of loneliness in his works, and this touches the most.
At one time, Anselm Kiefer was very struck, he is absolutely cosmic for me, as if the whole Universe could be placed in his work.
The works of Alberto Burri are very personal for me, his work with the material is striking, he very clearly expresses some kind of special inner state of a person.
I love David Hockney for his landscapes, Andy Goldsworthy for subtle and clean land art.
Of course, the list goes on, I am inspired by a lot, I like a lot about art history. Interesting artists can be found in every direction. Now there is an opportunity to visit European museums and galleries, this is an invaluable experience.
The painting "Collect All" reminded of Malevich's abstraction "Red Square". Therefore, the next question for the artist was about him.
- How do you feel about Malevich's work?
- Without a doubt, Malevich is an outstanding artist who turned the idea of \u200b\u200bpainting upside down. Unfortunately, people who are not associated with art are somewhat dismissive of this artist, which is associated with the imposition by the Soviet government of the idea that abstraction is bad and it is not art in general. It is very difficult to overcome such a stereotype.
As an example, I always use Malevich's works of the peasant cycle. My beloved “For the Harvest. Martha and Vanka. " There is a lot of color and inner tension in it. At first glance, it is static, but another moment - and we will see the movement. For people far from artistic theories, this is closer, and they begin to understand this ill-fated "Black Square" a little better.
Malevich is not only a square, a cross and a triangle. His work is broader and more interesting. It seems to me that we should turn to other works of our outstanding compatriot.
- What is art for you?
- For me, art is a constant discovery of myself and the world. The ability to admit your weaknesses, the ability to acquire new strength, to speak frankly with the world on any topic. Each artist himself chooses, so to speak, the topic of conversation. The main thing is to speak sincerely, then you will definitely find someone who will hear you.
For example, my art is about how in this world
This rubric was created for those who really lack emotions in everyday life. Every day there are so many different things and trips, scheduled meetings that sometimes there is not enough time for simple human communication. But it is clear that the emotional basis, the perception of the world through the sensory sphere is an important condition for a full life. It is extremely difficult to do without this, therefore it is recommended to reconsider priorities and lifestyle, everyone should strive for this. And all this is real due to the pictures.
We have specially collected oil paintings, the emotions on which are extremely expressive. Everything is unrealistically bright, pours out on a person directly from the canvas. It is recommended to look at the emotions depicted in the paintings with the heart. What is the flaming passion or boundless tenderness, sometimes bitter loneliness! Emotion pictures give a chance to experience feelings that cannot be experienced in reality. It is recommended that you look at several small oil canvases at once, so you get an emotional exposition that takes its rightful place in the house. In those rare moments when you are free, you can devote yourself to rest, plunge into the world of feelings, as emotions in the paintings of artists of the past and present are masterfully executed.
Human thoughts do not always have a verbal and business background, and it is extremely difficult not to emotionally demonstrate what is inside. Why excessive secrecy? What could be better than a real smile or sincere tears? Pay attention to the pictures with the emotions of people, these pictures show concentrated or relaxed features, delight and fear, fun. Just as the faces on the canvases convey feelings, so the pictures of the emotion of people provoke a certain reaction.
It is sometimes said that emotions are written on a person's face. Strong emotions are difficult to hide, they are read in the eyes, often in a smile, as well as in the sad folds around the lips, even in the blush on the cheeks and unexpected pallor. Fear and grief, joy, envy, hatred and love ...
Human emotions are easily moved by feelings, they are the seed from which something beautiful appears. A colossal selection of paintings gives you a chance to show what is inside you. Fill your living space with expressions of human emotion represented on canvas. Only in this way will you emphasize your own individuality, help to look into the soul, decorating the environment with paintings, where people do not hide emotions, but are ready to share them with artists and the whole world.
Let your guests learn more through the prism of emotions and feelings depicted in the paintings of artists, thus, it will be possible to come to mutual understanding. It is available to purchase a painting not only with a specific plot, but also in any size from the presented works or by individual order. In addition, you can recommend buying paintings to relatives and friends, respectively, you will act as a navigator for them in the world of artistic interior design!
In recent years, in our country, very great importance has been attached to "emotions": it is no coincidence that today a professional psychologist works in almost any organization, and it is becoming a natural norm for many people to regularly seek psychological help. We will not lag behind such practice: let us in this article figure out what kind of connection exists between paintings, as works of art, and human emotions.
And first, let's define the concepts. So, emotions are experiences that have a very strong effect on the mind and body of a person. At the same time, the experience of any person suggests that emotions are capable of influencing all aspects of a person's existence, which, in principle, is wonderful. After all, it's not a secret for anyone that people who are deprived of any emotions, as a rule, are undergoing constant treatment in psychiatric clinics.
Moreover, scientists note that each emotion can affect a person in a special way. Therefore, it is no coincidence that each person seeks to surround himself with the most positive emotions and, if possible, completely get rid of the negative aspects of our life. In order for a person's life to flourish with bright colors and there is art, which in our difficult time as a great emotional "outlet" is given great importance.Imagine that a person, tired and irritated after a hard day's work, sank heavily into his favorite chair at home and for a few minutes immersed himself in contemplation of his favorite oil painting, which is located on the wall opposite. Experience shows that at the same time, the negative emotions accumulated by a person during the day are capable of receding and disappearing in the most amazing way. So, a pleasant summer landscape or a delightful still life with roses can give its owner in just a few minutes a feeling of serene joy and fill a person with new inner strength.
But, this is provided that the paintings of the artists who are in the house belong to the category of "your" paintings. And so that, for example, oil painting brings you only one positive emotion, you need to understand two main psychological aspects. First of all, it is worth, looking at oil painting, to imagine what feelings guided the artist at the time of writing the canvas, and what emotional message he wants to convey to people with his work. It is not always easy, but with enough experience it always turns out well.
Secondly, you need to understand what kind of emotional state you have when dealing with this picture. Moreover, you need to approach your introspection quite "corrosive" and, as psychologists say, try to "delve" into yourself. To give an example, imagine that in a painting we see a wonderful rural landscape with shocks of fresh hay and a horse in the background.
Most likely, many people will just look at such an oil painting and that's it. But for a person who, perhaps, spent his entire childhood with his grandmother in the village, where it was so good and carefree that in 30 or 40 years his appearance of freshly cut hay will fill his soul with something light and airy and return his thoughts to the happiest time of my life.
Please note that everyone will have their own emotions in this regard, and they will be based on experiences, associations and their own emotional basis for perceiving the world. It is also worth noting that when creating pictures, symbols and the chosen color scheme play an important role in their emotional perception. So, everyone knows that, for example, the red color promotes emotional arousal, while the green color calms the human psyche.
As you can see, paintings by artists are capable of generating a variety of emotions in a person. We wish you to find such pictures that will influence you in the most positive way, and then use their amazing ability to give you joy and satisfaction in life.
Irina Alekseeva
