Art and Psychological Well-Being: Linking the Brain to the Aesthetic Emotion. Empirical studies suggest that art improves health and well-being among individuals. However, how aesthetic appreciation affects our cognitive and emotional states to promote physical and psychological well-being is still unclear.

1. Portrait Art
Sidra Akhtar

2.  Artistic Roles
 Description
 A traditional role of visual art is to describe
our self and our surroundings. Some of the
earliest artworks discovered are drawings
and paintings of humans and wild animals on
walls deep within prehistoric caves. One
particular image is a hand print: a universal
symbol of human communication.

3.  Portraits
 Today portraits, landscapes and still life are common
examples of description. Portraits capture the accuracy of
physical characteristics but the very best also transfer a
sense of an individual’s unique personality. For thousands
of years this role was reserved for images of those in
positions of power, influence and authority. The portrait not
only signifies who they are, but also solidifies class
structure by presenting only the highest-ranking members
of a society. The portrait bust of Egyptian Queen Nefertiti,
dated to around 1300 BCE, exemplifies beauty and royalty.
The full-length Imperial Portrait of Chinese Emperor
Xianfeng not only shows realism in the likeness of the
emperor, it exults in the patterns and colors of his robe and
the throne behind him.

6.  Landscapes
 Landscapes – by themselves – give us detailed
information about our natural and human made
surroundings; things like location, architecture, time
of day, year or season plus other physical information
such as geological elements and the plants and
animals within a particular region. ‘Nebamun Hunting
Fowl’ (below) is loaded with specific plant and animal
life in Egypt’s Nile river delta. This wall painting,
dating from around 1350 BCE, shows the scribe
Nebamun as he stands in a reed boat near a thicket of
papyrus capturing ducks. His cat actively grabs at two
birds as they try to fly away. Amongst the different
species are hawks, butterflies, herons, songbirds, and
fish. The figure sitting in the boat is his daughter. The
larger female figure standing at the stern is his wife.
The artist records the scene in great detail; he paints
every feather on the birds, and every scale on the fish
beneath the boat.

8.  Scientific Illustration
 Indeed, in many western cultures, the more
realistic the rendering of a scene the closer to
our idea of the ‘truth’ it becomes. In the 15th
century German artist Albrecht Durer creates
vivid works that show a keen sense of
observation. His Lobster from 1495 is
uncanny in its realism and sense of
animation.
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11.  Enhancing Our World
 Enhancing the world of our everyday lives is
another role art plays. This role is more
utilitarian than others. It includes textiles
and product design, decorative
embellishments to the items we use everyday
and all the aesthetic considerations that
create a more comfortable, expressive
environment.
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12.  Narratives: How Artists Tell Their Stories
 Artists can combine representation with more complex elements
and situational compositions to bring a narrative component into
art. Using subject matter – the objects and figures that inhabit a
work of art -- as a vehicle for communicating stories and other
cultural expressions, is a traditional function of visual art.
 The narrative tradition is strong in many cultures throughout the
world. They become a means to perpetuate knowledge, morals
and ethics, and can signify historical contexts within specific
cultures. Narrative takes many forms; the spoken or written word,
music, dance and visual art are the mediums most often used.
Many times one is used in conjunction with another. In his
Migration Series Jacob Lawrence paints stark, direct images that
communicate the realities of the African American experience in
their struggle to escape the repression of the South and overcome
the difficulties of adjusting to the big cities in the North.
 In contrast, photographers used the camera lens to document
examples of segregation in the United States. Here the image on
film tells its poignant story about inequalities based on race.
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14.  Spirit, Myth and Fantasy
 Tied to the idea of narrative, another artistic role is the exploration of other
worlds beyond our physical one. This world is in many ways richer than our
own and includes the world of spirit, myth, fantasy and the imagination; areas
particularly suited for the visual artist. We can see how art gives a rich and
varied treatment to these ideas. Artist Michael Spafford has spent his career
presenting classical Greek myths through painting, drawing and printmaking.
His spare, abstract style uses high contrast images to strong dramatic effect. A
Smiling Figure from ancient Mexico portrays a god of dance, music and joy. A
third example, Hieronymus Bosch’s painting the Temptation of Saint Anthony,
gives the subject matter both spiritual and bizarre significance in the way they
are presented. His creative imagination takes the subject of temptation and
raises it to the realm of the fantastic. There is an entire module devoted to the
idea of the other world later in this course.
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15.  Portraits have existed in one form or another since
the earliest civilizations. The ancient Egyptians,
Chinese, Greeks and Romans all have literary
evidence of portraiture but few examples have
survived.
 The earliest examples of individual portraits in art
come from Ancient Rome and are mostly painted with
tempera or encaustic on a wooden panel.
 Portrait painting, as we understand it today, evolves
from the humanistic values of Renaissance art.
 Artists create portraits of individuals and groups to
express the beauty, status, power, wealth or
character of their subjects.

16.  Artists use a wide range of media for portraiture, including
drawing, printing, painting, sculpture, photography and
multimedia.
 Some artists may wish display their artistic skill in capturing an
exact likeness of their subject by using a very realistic painting
technique.
 Some artists may wish to express their subjects inner personality
by simplifying or emphasizing the shapes, colours, tones or
textures of the portrait for dramatic effect.
 Some artists may reduce their subject to abstract elements where
the style or expressive power of the image is more important
than a physical resemblance to the sitter.
 The Self Portrait, which first became popular during the
Renaissance, is an intimate and revealing form of the genre.

17.  Albrecht Dürer was the first important
artist to produce a range of self portraits
that document both his physical and
artistic development.
 Rembrandt and Vincent Van Gogh are the
most prolific painters of self portraits,
both producing around forty works that
chart their life as an artist.

18. Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890)
 Vincent Van Gogh charted his
development as an artist in an amazing
series of candid self portraits. These not
only record the changes in his painting
technique, but also reveal his
psychological decline with a humility and
honesty not seen since the self portraits
of Rembrandt. In the last five years of his
life he painted over thirty self portraits.

19. Frida Kahlo (1907-1954)
 Frida Kahlo was born on July 6, 1907, in Coyoacán, a suburb of
Mexico City.
 At six years old Frida contracted polio which left her with a
deformed right foot and the cruel nickname, 'Peg-Leg' Frida.
 A streetcar accident in 1925 left Frida Kahlo disabled and changed
her life. She started to paint during her recovery.
 Kahlo met the great Mexican artist Diego Rivera in 1928 and
married him in 1929. Their relationship was always turbulent.
 Kahlo began to deny any European influences in her art. She
started to wear traditional Mexican costumes and braided her hair
with ribbons and flowers to identify with her indigenous Mexican
culture.
 After two unsuccessful pregnancies, Kahlo's paintings increasingly
dealt with her feelings about loss, infertility, pain and alienation.
 Most of her works are self portraits that explicitly deal with her
own physical and psychological suffering.
 During her lifetime, she did not enjoy the same level of
recognition as her husband, Diego Rivera, but today her intensely
autobiographical work is as critically acclaimed as that of her male
peers.
 In the summer of 1954, Frida Kahlo died from pneumonia in the
house where she was born.

20. Francis Bacon (1909-1992)
 Francis Bacon, the artist, was born in Dublin on 28 October, 1909, the second of five children.
 He left home at the age of sixteen and went to live in Berlin.
 In 1928 he decided to become an artist after seeing an exhibition of Picasso’s work in Paris.
 His early work (1929-1944) was influenced by Surrealism but did not gain much critical success.
 In 1944 Bacon exhibited ‘Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion’ to a public outcry due to its
horrific imagery. This was the key painting in the development of Francis Bacon’s work.
 After painting ‘Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion’ he destroyed most of his early work as
he believed that it failed to communicate the way he felt about the world.
 ‘Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion’ introduces many of the characteristics associated
with Francis Bacon’s art: mutilated imagery, a sense of anxiety and alienation, the triptych format, antique
gilt frames with glass and subjects that relate to the Crucifixion and Greek mythology.
 Bacon never painted from life - he always worked from photographs.
 Photographic references that Bacon frequently referred to were Velazquez's 'Portrait of Innocent X', the
wounded nurse from the film 'The Battleship Potemkin', Muybridge’s ‘The Human Figure in Motion’, Clark's
'Positioning in Radiography' and medical textbooks that illustrated diseases of the mouth.
 Bacon's art was seen as a metaphor for the corruption of the human spirit in the post World War Two era.
 Bacon often painted variations of the same subject and sometimes revisited certain subjects many years
later. ‘Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion’ has a later version painted in 1988.
 Francis Bacon died of a heart attack in Madrid in 1992.

21. Artistic Categories
 Visual arts are generally divided into
categories that make distinctions based
on the context of the work. For example,
Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Mona Lisa’ would not
fall into the same category as, say, a
graphic poster for a rock concert. Some
artworks can be placed in more than one
category.
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23.  Fine Art
 This category includes drawings,
paintings, sculptures, photographs and, in
the last decade, new media that are in
museum collections and sold through
commercial art galleries. Fine art has a
distinction of being some of the finest
examples of our human artistic heritage.
Here is where you will find the Mona Lisa,
and ancient sculpture, such as the
Gandhara figure from India below, and
stunning ceramics from different cultures
and time periods.
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24.  Popular Culture
 This category contains the many products and
images we are exposed to every day. In the
industrialized world, this includes posters,
graffiti, advertising, popular music, television and
digital imagery, magazines, books and movies
(as distinguished from film, which we’ll examine
in a different context later in the course). Also
included are cars, celebrity status and all the
ideas and attitudes that help define the
contemporary period of a particular culture.
 Handbills posted on telephone poles or the sides
of buildings are graphic, colorful and informative,
but they also provide a street level texture to the
urban environment most of us live in. Public
murals serve this same function. They put an
aesthetic stamp on an otherwise bland and
industrialized landscape.
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27.  Decorative Arts
 Sometimes called "crafts," this is a category
of art that shows a high degree of skilled
workmanship in its production. Craft works
are normally associated with utilitarian
purposes, but can be aesthetic works in
themselves, often highly decorated. The
Mexican ceramic vessel below is an example.
Handmade furniture and glassware, fine
metalworking and leather goods are
examples of craft.
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