Chapter 1
Framing the issue
Why do painters paint? Of course, there are numerous possible reasons: to produce artworks for othersâ enjoyment, to solve visual problems, to experiment with a medium, to communicate personal ideas, and to contribute to a longstanding artistic tradition, to name just a few of the most obvious incentives. In this book I argue that there is yet another, critically important but often overlooked reason.
Painters paint to feel.
They paint because it conjures a sense of intimacy, or makes them feel stimulated and challenged, or absorbed by something mysterious and meaningful. It makes them feel alive and creative and liberated from the constraints of life. Painters may also paint in order to deal with loss â to grieve. It makes them feel sheltered. At home.
Safe.
And sound.
Painting is thus an activity that enables various desirable and highly valued affective states. In this study, I explore how and why this is so. To support and illustrate my ideas, I also analyze several special feelings that are evoked by painting in the proposed manner. On the whole, this means that I consider paintings â or, more accurately, paintings-in-progress â as means to affective ends rather than as objects of aesthetic evaluation or psychobiographical interpretation. I have next to nothing to say about individual paintersâ lives or the reception of their paintings. Nor do I dig deep into the various ideological, historical, and cultural factors that influence paintersâ artistic self-conceptions and dispositions. Although such factors contribute greatly to the experience of painting, I focus first and foremost on creative experience itself and on the psychological mechanisms and dynamics that underlie the affects at stake. To achieve a truthful picture of the experience of painting, I substantiate my account throughout with paintersâ own descriptions of how they feel while they work, as documented in interviews, biographies and autobiographies, artistâs monographs, exhibition texts, and so forth.
On the whole, the proposed view will be developed by integrating philosophical thinking on affectivity with psychoanalytical theorization on creativity. But why these two approaches? Can they provide appropriate conceptual tools for investigating the matter, and do they make a good mutual fit? Much philosophical research on creativity has tended to foreground cognition at the expense of affect, for instance by prioritizing problem solving, imagination, and divergent thinking over the âfeelâ of creative activity. To give just one example, a recent collection of essays on the philosophy of creativity mentions âaffectâ and âemotionâ a mere handful of times, and even then, as more or less subsidiary phenomena to cognition (see Paul & Kaufman, 2014). This is not to deny the merits of these contributions but to highlight their priorities in studying the phenomenon.
There is more to the story, though, for philosophers have clearly had something to say about the role of emotions and feelings in artistic creativity as well. One need only look at the question of expression in the field of aesthetics to see that this is the case (see, e.g., Collingwood, 1938/1969; Nahm, 1955; Khatchadourian, 1965; Graham, 2005; Matravers, 2010; Wiltsher, 2017). In its narrowest form, the expressionist theory of art holds that artistic work is, or at least involves, an expression of the artistâs own feelings and emotions, be they conscious or unconscious. A broader form of the theory allows that artworks can express â or be expressive of â ideas and feelings more generally, apart from whatever their makers think and feel. Whether that or the other is the case has been a heated topic of debate for decades now.
That being said, I intend to sidestep the issue of expression as far as possible, for two main reasons. First, I do not want to get mired in semantic disputes over what it means âto express an emotionâ or what âthe expression of feeling in artâ would necessitate. Indeed, owing to its ambiguity, I generally avoid using the term âexpressionâ altogether. Second, and more importantly, the focal point of this study lies elsewhere â that is, in the evocation rather than the expression of affect. Simply put, I am primarily interested in the affective effects of painting: how it permits the painter to feel things that would otherwise be difficult if not impossible to feel. In short, painters probably paint because they feel, but I highlight the feelings they feel because they paint.
So where, then, do I suggest we turn for suitable philosophical insight into the painterly pursuit of affect? Contemporary philosophers of mind have used the concepts of scaffolding and niche construction to anatomize how our active engagements with the world influence our feeling, thinking, and doing. Put broadly, âscaffoldingâ designates the various ways in which environmental resources â such as things, other people, physical spaces, etc. â are used to elicit, regulate, and augment our affects, cognitions, and actions (see Colombetti & Krueger, 2015; Sterelny, 2010; Sutton, 2016). The term âniche constructionâ has been applied similarly to detail the various processes whereby we manipulate our material, social, epistemic, and cultural landscapes to support and enhance our psychological and experiential capabilities (see Clark, 2006; Sterelny, 2010; Sutton, Harris, Keil, & Barnier, 2010). Integrating the key points of these conceptualizations amounts to the following premise: we build niches to scaffold our minds. It is this basic idea that I apply to painting in the present study. Viewed in this light, painting involves setting up a creative niche in which paintings-in-progress scaffold the artistâs ongoing emotions, moods, and other affective states.
I maintain that âniche constructionâ and âaffective scaffoldingâ are particularly useful in analyzing the formal and structural aspects of artistsâ affect-inducing exchanges with their paintings. However, these concepts can only take us so far in grasping the affective dynamics of the creative process. For one thing, they cannot really shed much light on why certain affective states become individually important and desirable in painting. Nor do they explain how the activity of painting develops into a crucial resource for such feelings in the first place. In sum, what is lacking from the given philosophical approach is an in-depth psychological understanding of what drives our scaffolding interactions and how these interactions incorporate lengthy personal histories of feeling. Hence, we need a complementary account of why painters come to seek certain feelings in relation to their artwork, and how paintings in turn come to function as invaluable scaffolds for such feelings.
This is where psychoanalysis makes a timely entry into the discussion. Psychoanalytical research incorporates a long tradition of studying the developmental roots and unconscious dynamics of artistic creation. Moreover, in fleshing out these aspects of creativity, psychoanalytical theoreticians have often provided thorough observations concerning the actual experience of art-making. In some cases, the thinkers in question have been artists themselves; in others, they have interviewed or even taught artists. Psychoanalysis thus constitutes an incomparably abundant reservoir of theoretical and experiential knowledge on the creative mind and the artistic process.
Drawing mainly from so-called relationally oriented psychoanalytical thinking, and especially from the work of one of its most prominent figures, D. W. Winnicott, I maintain that painting is a reciprocal activity conditioned by early interactions with others, and that it is accordingly motivated and organized by primal, relationally established affective concerns, such as the need to achieve meaningful and vital contacts with oneâs surroundings. From this point of view, painting is seen as a creative form of object-relating that is deeply rooted in the earliest interactions between the infant and the caretaking environment. This also means that painters come to their here-and-now engagements with paintings from a lengthy and complexly patterned background of personal affective scaffoldings. Simply put, individual developmental history significantly influences what painters seek to feel via painting, and how they come to achieve this.
At this point, it is worth mentioning that most psychoanalytical models of artistic creativity follow some variant of the previously mentioned expressionist approach to art. Typically, these models presuppose that the artist projects elements of inchoate affective experience into the developing artwork, in and through which these elements are then shaped into and expressed in novel form, and finally reintegrated back into the artistâs enhanced sense of self. To reiterate, I do not intend to delve into the expressive side of creation, although I do reflect on it when necessary, especially when the scaffolded affect under scrutiny can be made intelligible only in relation to the articulation and formalization of the artistâs experience. Overall, however, I shift the spotlight on to the enablement and evocation of affects which cannot be said to exist, even formlessly, prior to the painterly endeavor, and which are essentially made possible and supported by the activity of painting itself. Simply put, I aim to analyze the co-constitution of novel affects through painterâpainting interaction. This entails that, by way of painting, artists seek to experience feelings that are not in any sense latent and therefore âmerely waitingâ to be articulated and expressed. I take my lead here from psychoanalyst George Hagman, who also suggests a ânew perspective on creativity, in which the artist actively seeks to bring about an experience to confirm and/or repair his or her sense of selfâ (Hagman, 2005, p. 68, my italics). To be clear, the advocated approach is by no means incompatible with expressionist theories of art; however, fleshing out and arguing for the latter falls beyond the scope of the present study.
All in all, then, by combining key contributions from both philosophy and psychoanalysis, this study seeks to open up new perspectives on affectivity in painting. This will be done without subordinating either discipline to the other. The two are applied as complementary and equally important building blocks in the proposed argument. First, philosophy is used to develop a cogent account of how the act of painting, as a creative interaction with an environmental resource, enables the painter to attain and sustain desirable feelings. Psychoanalysis, in turn, is used to specify the developmental, dynamic, and relational underpinnings of these affective processes; it thus provides the examination with a depth and ontogenetic awareness missing from the philosophical approach. Overall, I would like to think that the relevance and strength of this study lies precisely in its open-minded yet critical integration of (mostly contemporary) psychoanalytic and philosophical thinking, and in its truthfulness to paintersâ first-person experiential descriptions of painting.
To reiterate, my main thesis is that painting is not only about producing art, conveying feelings and ideas, and so on, but also about setting up and inhabiting a niche in which certain highly valued affects are interactively enabled, supported, and regulated. I would also like to point out that the feelings discussed in this study are not just any old feelings, so to speak. Rather, they pertain to profound and deeply ingrained human concerns over subjective and objective reality, meaningful and vital living, and the boundaries between self, others, and the world. That is to say, some of the most intense and valued feelings enabled by painting â such as the feelings of fluidity, unity, resonance, and aliveness â bear directly on how we âfind ourselves in the worldâ. Painters pursue the mentioned kinds of affects via painting because they galvanize, enrich, and (re)structure their overall sense of being. This means that painting and painterly affectivity carry considerable existential import â a fact that I will consistently underline and elaborate on throughout this study.
Finally, with all this talk about feelings, emotions, and affects, the term âaffectivityâ calls for a bit more clarification. What, exactly, does it refer to? Needless to say, there are numerous competing accounts, taxonomies, and theories out there. I will not wade into this debate here. Instead, I will briefly discuss one alternative for identifying and distinguishing between different phenomena belonging to the so-called âaffective realmâ (Ben-Zeâev, 1997). This will serve to illustrate the multifaceted nature of affectivity and, more importantly, to elucidate how I generally conceive of it in this study.
There are two criteria that are particularly apposite to the given classificatory task: (1) the intentionality, and (2) the actuality vs. potentiality of the state under consideration (Ben-Zeâev, 1997, pp. 248â249; see also Goldie, 2000; Colombetti & Roberts, 2015). Here, âintentionalityâ means that mental states are about or directed towards some object or the other, be it specific (such as another person) or diffuse (such as the world in general). Affective states, too, are intentional, but to add to that, they are states that disclose their intentional objects on a positiveânegative continuum. In short, they are evaluative intentional states. For example, the painterâs satisfaction with her work involves a positive evaluation of the intentional object of her feeling, namely, the painting. However, mere evaluation does not suffice for a state to be affective: the painter may judge her work to be satisfactory without actually feeling so. Indeed, a combination of the evaluative intentional dimension with a significant feeling dimension distinguishes affective states from non-affective ones (Ben-Zeâev, 1997, p. 248). As for the second criterion, mental states can generally be said to be either occurrent or dispositional. For example, at a certain moment the painter may feel her painting to be going down the drain; indeed, she might feel downright frustrated and dispirited. At the same time, she may be fundamentally predisposed to feel that her artistic efforts will, on the whole, be successful. The painter thus has a basic inclination to feel optimistic about her work despite being momentarily dejected.
By charting possible variations in (1) the intentionality of the evaluative stand and (2) the actuality/potentiality of the feeling dimension, we arrive at four basic types of affective phenomena (Ben-Zeâev, 1997, p. 249). Emotions are occurrent states of feeling that take on relatively specific intentional objects. For example, one may feel proud of a personal achievement or disappointed at being let down by a friend. Moods, like emotions, are occurrent states of feeling, but involve more diffuse intentionality. One may, for instance, feel angry at nothing in particular and everything in general â at the whole world, as it were. Emotions and moods tend to occur episodically, with emotions typically lasting from minutes to hours and moods from hours and days to weeks, and perhaps even months. Sentiments, in turn, can be seen as dispositional states that concern specific intentional objects. An example of this would be enduring love for oneâs partner. In this case, the love can be said to âbe thereâ even when it is not explicitly manifest in the occurrent emotion felt towards the other. Finally, affective traits are dispositional states that have general intentionality. In this category we find traits such as enviousness, which may predispose the individual to feel jealous of any number of things, and which can even last for an entire lifetime. In sum, on this view the affective realm consists of two occurrent states, emotions and moods, and of two dispositional states, sentiments and affective traits.
There is certainly more to affectivity than the presented classification permits. For instance, it has been posited that, in addition to emotions and moods, we experience atmospheric feelings, feelings of being alive, and vitality affects, none of which fall neatly into the stated categories (see Fuchs, 2013; Ratcliffe, 2008; Stern, 1985, respectively). Indeed, in the final chapter of this book, I also discuss a special class of feeling that is not properly recognized by the aforementioned taxonomical approach. That being said, my focus is predominantly on occurr...
