This book offers the first comprehensive examination of the psychodynamic theories of artistic creativity and the arts. Neither oversimplifying the complexity of these theories, nor bogging down in pedantic discourse, it honors the depth and richness of the work of Freud, Adler, Kris, Reich, Jung, and several lesser-known theorists, while making their theories readily accessible to the educated reader. After discussing the role of theory, the work offers each concept as a readily usable template for describing and understanding a work of art, whether painting, sculpture, music, dance, film, poetry, or prose. With these theories at hand, anyone interested in the arts will possess a far richer vocabulary for describing the artistic experience and a deeper understanding of the artist's creativity.
Applies research on how humans perceive, process and store information to the viewing and interpretation of art. The author argues that the clearest view of the mind comes from creating or experiencing art. The illustrations cover a range of examples but focus primarily on Western art.
Why do we enjoy art? What inspires us to create artistic works? How can brain science help us understand our taste in art? The Psychology of Art provides an eclectic introduction to the myriad ways in which psychology can help us understand and appreciate creative activities. Exploring how we perceive everything from colour to motion, the book examines art-making as a form of human behaviour that stretches back throughout history as a constant source of inspiration, conflict and conversation. It also considers how factors such as fakery, reproduction technology and sexism influence our judgements about art. By asking what psychological science has to do with artistic appreciation, The Psychology of Art introduces the reader to new ways of thinking about how we create and consume art.
Interpreting Visual Art explores the psychological and cognitive mechanisms that underlie one's interpretation of art. After the brain encodes visual information, this encoding is then processed by perceptual mechanisms to identify objects and depth in pictures. The brain incorporates many factors in order for people to "see" the art. Cognitive processes have a major role in how people interpret artworks because attention, memory, and language are also linked to the aesthetic experience. Catherine Weir and Evans Mandes first examine major attributes of aesthetic judgement - balance, symmetry, color, line, and shape - from an empirical point of view as opposed to more philosophical and speculative approaches. Then, they explore the perceptual process, paying special attention to art history in the Western world and emphasizing techniques from cave paintings to modern art. The role beauty and emotions play in our interpretations of pictures have been investigated from many approaches: evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and appraisal theory. Through the application of empirical research in cognitive science to master works from Botticelli to Pollock, readers are introduced to a research-oriented understanding of how art has been perceived, interpreted, and appreciated in the twenty-first century. This book will appeal to those interested in art as well as those teaching art history, psychology, and neuroscience.
Psychologist Ellen Winner studies the creative, nonliteral discourse of children's spontaneous speech, examining how their abilities to use and interpret figurative language change as they grow older, and what such language shows us about the changing feature's of children's minds.
"In mid-December, 2018, a man stood before one of the most beloved paintings in Europe, Botticelli's The Birth of Venus, and had a heart attack (Henri Neuendorf,ArtNet News, December 19, 2018 https://news.artnet.com/art-world/heart-attack-botticelli-uffizi-1425448). Venus is that painting you're thinking of, the one with the shapely, wheat-haired woman standing in a seashell, with one hand covering her breasts and the other holding her long, golden locks in front of her groin. Floating above her right shoulder are two winged figures with their arms wrapped around each other, who blow air on her like distant kisses. On her left stands a woman (the Hora of Spring?) who holds what looks like a drape and gazes directly at our goddess, whose face, tilted just so, looks toward the viewer with a gentle yet mature glance, as if she was born knowing all one needs to know of love and seduction. Fortunately, the man whose heart failed while looking back at our all-knowing Venus survived, but he was not the first to collapse while viewing art in Florence, and no doubt he will not be the last. It has happened often enough that there is a medical term for the phenomenon named after the first notable man to succumb, "Stendhal Syndrome." Apparently the French author of On Love, a treatise on romantic passion, reported that he fell ill in 1817 after viewing too much Florentine art (Bamforth 945). Is it any wonder that Botticelli's winged figures hang on to each other so tightly? To be awestruck is to be in imminent danger"--