Orange Emotions

Abstract mixed media

Orange is electrifying. A piece of sun.

Abstract painting is about exploring emotional and subconscious associations with shapes and color arrangements.  What emotions are orange abstracts exciting in us? Joy, rage, optimism, energy, anxiety?

Here is the experiment we made for this chapter. We painted an abstract painting in orange and asked others to describe their emotional engagement triggered by these paintings. Naming emotions is difficult – the path between the ‘gut’ and the rational brain is quite convoluted. To make it a little easier to find words, we procured a dictionary of over hundred emotions to chose from.

Rothko’s orange color blocks were an ultimate primer in this endeavor. Simplicity and clarity of colors- an amazing study of color psychology! A vivid realizations that a simple addition of a stripe of black (or white) to essentially the same orange color blocks profoundly changes the emotional mood of the painting.

Our goal was to create a vocabulary of emotions triggered by abstract orange paintings – sensory visual and limbic systems in overdrive, then articulation. To explore the commonality vs. uniquely personal emotional reactions to a painting.

Is there a way to verbalize visually-triggered emotions to reach a commonly understood experience when observing an abstract painting – or is the emotion so uniquely individual that efforts to capture it in a universal way are bound to simplify the complexity and diversity of reactions?

We thought that we could come up with titles for our ‘unnamed’ paintings that capture the collectivity of emotional responses they triggered in the ‘audience’ (us being a sampling of it; some also solicited on Instagram). We naively believed that feelings will be overwhelmingly similar for each painting; we were in for a surprise – some paintings were, mildly put, a mixed bag of feelings – sometimes triggering a spread from positive and optimistic to negative and disturbing emotions.

In the end, we left our paintings unnamed, respecting diversity and nuances of individual emotional outpours. Maybe, our ’emotion vocabularies’ are beginnings of poems. Perhaps simple titles are insufficient to capture emotional complexity of these paintings. Curiously, Rothko’s simplicity of color blocks elicited a more universal emotional clarity.

Making the video out of this experiment (it seemed better suited for a scientific presentation) was a challenge – but it turned out quite interesting – you can participate in the experiment yourself – choose the words that describe your emotional response to our diverse collection of ‘orange’ abstracts.  Are they similar to the others in our vocabulary? Or in the same emotional “range’? Are human companions in our presentation harmonious or dissociative with emotions and moods evoked by the paintings (for you)?

Being ‘leftbrainartists’, we may be too prone to over-analyze this exercise; yet you cannot escape the ‘feeling’ that the attraction to the abstract art (and all other forms of visual arts) is driven in great part by emotional responses it evokes in us.