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Affect in Artistic Creativity

Painting to Feel

Bibliographic Data

ID4160950
AuthorsVanessa Brassey (0000-0003-1725-2864, King's College London, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume63
Issue1
Pages129-132
Publication date2023-03-02
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe British Journal of Aesthetics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0007-0904 • E-ISSN: 1468-2842
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/aesthj/ayab069
OpenAlexW4239836232
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited1

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

Aesthetics · Affect (linguistics · Argument (complex analysis · Art · Creativity · Expression (computer science · Feeling · Painting · Visual arts · Aesthetic Perception and Analysis · Communication · Computer Science · Embodied and Extended Cognition · Psychology · Social Psychology · Visual Culture and Art Theory

  • Mä kaipaan takas sun luo, sinne missä mun hyvä on”

    Open Access•Anna Pakarinen•Lähikuva – audiovisuaalisen…•2023

  • Choreographies in the beginnings of psychoanalytic psychotherapy sessions with an adult male patient

    Open Access•Päivi Aho-Mustonen, Henrik Enckell et al.•International Forum of…•2025

  • A catalyst for education? A study on the impact of artificial intelligence assisted learning in painting courses on college students' continuous learning intention

    Open Access•Jie Sun, Xinyi Huang et al.•Acta Psychologica•2025

  • Scaffoldings of the affective mind

    Giovanna Colombetti, Joachim Krueger•Philosophical Psychology•2014

Unique citing works3
Citations per year1
Citation span2023 - 2025 (3)
Citation velocityrecent
Highly citedNo
Citation typesNeutral: 3

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