When I think about emotions in art particuarly sadness I think of Rothko. Although there is not much visually in common between Rothkos art and my own, He was a leading artist in expressing his mental state visually. Rothko developed a carefully considered language of feeling using colour. Rothko wrote that he was interested only in expressing basic human emotions. He stated that there is “wild terror and suffering and blind drives and asspirations” raging within his glowing fields of pigment. He stated that “this is the way in which I could achieve the greated intensity of the tragic irreconcilability of the basic violence which lies at the bottom of human experience and the daily life that must deal with it”
Found in drafts for essay on Nietsche. James E.B Breslin archive on Mark Rothko, 1940-1993, Getty Research Institute, Research Library, acc.no.2003.M.23 (Box 17).
David Maclagan suggests that painting that “draws attention to its ‘fracture’ or material handling, dramatises its aesthetic effects” He states that “exchanges between spectators and the painting they are feeling their way into often take place at a largely unconcious level”.
He suggests that “‘feeling’ has blurred edges at both the perceptual and emotional level. There are sometimes feelings that it is impossible to situate one side or another of this categorical divide: they are also most likely to be feelings that are difficult or impossible to put into words. It may well be that painting has a particular involvement with precisely these non verbal or pre-verbal feelings.”
Davey, N (1999) ‘The Hermeneatics of seeing’ In I. Heywood and B. Sandwell (eds), ‘Interpreting Visual Culture, London: Routledge.
I think that in my own art practice I am trying to express things which are difficult to express verbally, or perhaps whilst manipulating and working with paint and other media these feelings come out involuntarily in my art work. Certain emotions create more powerful paintings.
