Aesthetics & Emotions
What is most interesting about our experience as humans is our capability to feel emotion. One might say our emotions are what make us human. Emotions, being a psychological event. Emotions are also key to understanding, experiencing, and creating artwork. In class we talked about emotion coming in three phases; the cognitive stimulus, which may be the physical event that triggers a specific emotion to rise; the affective echo, the feelings that surface, ‘echoing’ when you relive the physical event; and the physiological response, feeling the emotion. I find the philological breakdown of emotion interesting, and thinking deeply about what makes emotion emotion. I think the answer to that is the human experience. The way this all crumbles into art is that humans understand art through feeling. We as artists also create artwork through our feelings.
During this last semester of mine, I am also taking a class titled The Process of Creative Process in the DVA led by Caitlin Metz. In this class, we discuss the difference between creative process and creative practice. Practice being what you do to fuel your creative tank, and process being the steps you take to achieve your project goals. We talked a lot about introspection and what it means to be inspired. A recent topic we dove into was how we can sustain, channel, or shift our emotions to benefit in our creative practice/process. For this topic, they brought in a partner of theirs, Hannah Milks, to further delve into the topic. We all created a chart that resembles a 4-square quadrant with a circle in the middle. In the middle of the chart is our ‘creative flow state’ which is the emotion and state of mind of which we work best and are most inspired. What is most interesting is that this flow state, this baseline if you will, is different for all people and creatives. Some people need to be at a higher energy level for the best inspiration. Some others prefer it to be more mellow. The thing about it is, everything is a spectrum of feeling in different directions.
The further outside of the safety circle you begin to feel, the further you are from your flow state. Outside of a person’s flow state is when a person may begin to feel discombobulated, in this example, too high activation in someone could reference a panic attack, and too deactivated a person may be depressed. If someone did feel they had low energy and feeling depressed, they would be in the lower left quadrant. To better their emotional state and raise themselves closer to their baseline, they could do something for their creative practice; being an input. An example of output would be acting apart of your creative process and actively getting project goals done.
In the meantime, focusing on learning how to sustain, channel, or shift your own emotion to benefit your personal creative practice and process has been something I have been thinking about. Being an artist is embedded into my lifestyle and the way I feel varying every day also affects that. I think sustaining knowledge on learning how to better regulate your own feelings and emotions is something everyone should try to be more consciously aware of.
