The Feeling of the Form: Style as Dynamic ‘Textured’ Expression

Abstract

Understanding the complexities of how emotions could be implicated in the semantic (subject-matter) and the syntactic level (form/style) in art might contribute to integrating contrasting approaches regarding emotion experience and meaning. This study explores what happens when we strip away subject matter and only provide expressive information that is embedded in the physical-sensory qualities of ‘style’ of non-representational forms. What could be, if we ask artists to produce specific emotions-matières (the way in which paint—its materiality—is applied by an artist) intended to communicate specific emotion’s states to observers? Could observers share somehow these emotional artistic intentions, yielding some consistency across ratings regarding the intended meanings and the symbolic potential of the drawings? A cross-cultural study was performed (152 Canadians, 48 Greeks, 68 Japanese) using 12 non-representational, emotion-drawing stimuli of the emotion at hand. The results showed a systematic sharing of affective meaning across artists, spectators and cultures. This study serves as an illustrative case for discussion. For spectators to match the bottom up spatiotemporal derived from the syntactic, demands to go all the way down to catch up and match the stimulus impact as an ‘as if’ reciprocally created homology based on affective predictions. At this interface there is mutuality between perceiving, feeling and imaging, indicating the deep passage from expression/gesture to representation. It is discussed that there is continuity between expression and experience and agency is at its core—yet, shaped by culture it participates differentially in this iterative matching of top-down affective predictions checked against first-level bottom-up sensory-motor affective cues.