Research exploration

Looking trough art movements from realism to expressionism, and expressionism to abstract and postmodernism, it is clear that art has grown out of visual reality and now defines itself through a philosophical meaning. This notion revealed itself first by appearing as expressionism in which artists started to present the world under a subjective perspective. Violent distortions to real life were portrayed on canvas to obtain an emotional effect and vividly transmit personal moods and ideas through the artist’s paintings. This concept became more concrete by abstract artists who used a visual language of form, colour and line to create compositions with the degree of independence from visual references in the world, attempting to reduce visible reality by showing different ways of describing visual experience to the artists.

The relationship between shapes and emotions transmitted by them based on their position or colour or quantity and establishing the philosophical meaning of non-objective painting is not something new. Nevertheless it took two years for Wassily Kandinsky to crystallize this miraculous discovery. In his book “Point and line to plan” he considers that horizontal and vertical lines tend to be cold and warm respectively so defines a “square” shape to create a balance between the two. He also discusses that small form placed on the top of the plane tends to look lighter and more free, however, large shapes seem to be heavier when placed at the top of the picture. As Paul Overy discusses Kandinsky theory in “Kandinsky: The Language of the Eye”, what Kandinsky means here is that our consciousness of space around us in the real world influences our perception of what we see around us. For example, when we see large shapes at the top of a picture we associate with them the force of gravity pulling them in the sky. Conversely, when we see small objects at the top of a picture it radiates a free spirit like birds in the sky; creating a sense of lightness about the painting.   

I found myself enthused in Kandinsky’s theory and wanted to investigate the effect of shapes and their colours on people’s psychology. Are the effects similar for each individual? The key question in this study is, how can we affect people by changing their perception toward the world around them making them experience new situations that they have rarely encountered, through the medium of illusion?