I started this painting yesterday. So far, I have used emulsion and pencil on the canvas. I think I was feeling quite calm and this shows in the painting. However at the moment I can see some ominous faces. It is not finished so it could change quite a bit yet, we will have to see how it turns out. At the moment I am quite pleased with the way it is coming along. I like the taupe against the gray blue and white.
Freud was concerned with inner life and saw the artistic product not as aesthetic object but as aesthetic experience. He states that audiences value images of a fused inner and outer reality highly.
Freud, S (1908) ‘Creative Writers and Daydreaming’ in Strachey, J (ed) (2001) The complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud volume IX. London: Vintage
Wollheim attributes to Freud the view that a work of art that fully engages us involves us in complex mental activities, which include efforts of mastery as well as regressive pleasure.
Wollheim. (1974) On Art and the Mind. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Ricoeur suggests that we might think of aesthetic experience in terms of an alteration of dreaming and waking states.
Ricoeur, P. (1970) Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Wollheim (1974) implies by contrast that to be aesthetically engaged one must be fully awake.
Ernst Kris states that the artist’s inspired creativity involves a continual interplay between creation and criticism which is manifested in the painter’s stepping back to observe the effect. He suggests that this is “the shift in psychic level, consisting in the fluctuation of a functional regression and control” (Ernst Kris 1952:253) therefore the artist is his own audience whilst he works.
Kris, E. (1952) Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art. New York: International Universitys Press.
