Affect in Artistic Creativity: Painting to Feel

Abstract

Why do we paint pictures? We paint them to instruct, to delight or commemorate loved ones, to convey attitudes or emotions, or for money. Jussi A. Saarinen thinks there is a more fundamental motivation that explains the persistence of painting in the digital age. In slogan form ‘painters paint to feel’ (p. 1), by which he means that painters generate ‘highly valued’ (p. 1), affective feedback loops exclusively enabled through art-making. In this way, Affect in Artistic Creativity provides a fresh take on the familiar puzzle of the expression of emotions in pictures. Analytic philosophers commonly distinguish between expressive and non-expressive pictures, understanding expressive pictures to be those in which emotional feeling is conveyed. This distinction is central to the debate concerning how an expressive picture relates, triggers or conveys emotions. Saarinen’s focus is adjacent to this. His interest lies in how the activity of artistic painting provides the artist with access to a peculiarly pleasurable and valuable feeling of being. To this end, his argument draws on work in psychotherapy and analytic philosophy. The result is a substantially novel and potentially revitalizing angle on a well-worn puzzle. For, if Saarinen’s headline claim is true—that there is a distinctive existential feeling that arises from an activity only accessible to painter-artists, and which extends into the painting—then there is reason to revisit the idea of a conceptual tie holding between artist and pictorial content. In this way, the adjacent puzzle would move the needle on the central debate.