Emotions in Art

"The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place, from the sky, from the earth, from a passing shape, from a spider's web."  

Pablo Picasso

Colors & Emotions

When trying to express emotions in art, the possibilities are endless. Using the elements of texture, marks, or shapes, emotions can be portrayed, but the element I will be bringing my focus to in today's activity is something different: color. Not exactly sure how I would execute the process of displaying emotions through colors correctly, I turned to Debora Stewart's book, Abstract Art, for guidance. Stewart claims that the colors you choose directly express emotions. For example, a painting with a primary color of red often displays a sense of power, intensity, or anger (Stewart 39). With Stewart's writing, I realize that each of the basic colors have with them a set of particular meanings and emotions. These sets of emotions act as prerequisites for artists when they go about choosing the colors they will use in their pieces. With a greater understanding of how colors can portray emotion through Stewart's writing, it impacted me to create my own set of attached emotions I feel correspond to each of the basic colors, which is shown above. As well the chart above, Stewart has also impacted me in my art. In my first mini-attempt to apply her concept that the colors you choose directly express emotions, I painted my own piece. During the process, I made conscious decisions to only choose colors I thought adequately expressed what I was feeling. A dominating red and green, along with other minor colors like blue, purple, orange, and yellow is what resulted through applying Stewart's writing. The final result of this application is below.

First Attempt

Adding Blue

Composition and Emotions Chart

Continuing the concept of exhibiting emotion through color in art pieces, I sat down and made a second attempt on a bigger canvas. Reading on in Stewart's book, I found that her tips on this concept helped greatly. She states that a great way to display emotion is to "experiment with paints for this exercise and only use colors that represent certain emotions to you...emotions such as joy, fear, sadness, happiness, peace, and isolation" (Stewart 42). Through Stewart's writing, it has impacted the direction and result of my piece immensely. It has allowed me to independently customize and choose my own emotions for colors, realizing that everyone will have different preconceived perceptions of different colors. This, in turn, has made Stewart's writing impact my activity by making my piece a very personal one, with each different color of paint I used having personal meaning to me (you can use my chart above as a key for the colors). The final product of this is shown below.

Finished Product

What form of art do you think best portrays emotion? Music, paintings, dance? Do you think there is a right way to portray emotion, or should that be up to the artist?

              Stewart, Debora. Abstract Art Painting: Expressions in Mixed Media. Cincinnati, OH: North Light,               2015. Print.