This is from an email newsletter I receive from Robert Genn, a painter here in BC.

His emails are pretty wide-ranging, but at the core is always the topic of creativity.

I thought this one in particular worth sharing.

Neuroarthistory

September 26, 2006

A new art buzzword is “neuroarthistory.” It’s the brain-blatt of a couple of U.K. professors. Art history expert John Onians of the University of East Anglia, and neuroscientist Semir Zeki of University College, London, using new scanning  techniques, are probing the brains of artists, including dead ones. They are attempting to answer questions such as: What went on in the brains of Monet, Leonardo, and the ancient cave-painters? What goes on in the brains of today’s working artists? How do the brains of amateur and professional artists differ? Why do artists in certain times or places have certain visual tastes?

“The most interesting aspect of neuroarthistory is the way it enables us to get inside the minds of people who either could not or did not write about their work,” says Prof. Onians. “We can now understand much about the visual and motor preferences of people separated from us by  thousands of miles or thousands of years.” The profs speculate on 32,000-year-old art in the cave of Chauvet in France. “No approach other than neuroarthistory can explain why this, the first art, is also the most naturalistic, capturing the mental and physical resources of bears and lions as if on a wildlife film,” says Onians.

Examining these cave drawings in person, I noticed effects not unlike modern drawing. There’s the characterization of species differentiation through broad expressive strokes. For example, the back-lines of the rhinoceros-like beasts on the left side
of the cave–repeated five times–are strong and weighty–merging directly into their tails. I’ve often wondered if these “primitive” drawings were done without the interference of advanced language skills. Did these artists have words such as “back” or “tail”? So you know what we’re talking about, I’ve asked Andrew to illustrate these remarkable
works in the current clickback.

According to the profs, neuroarthistory can also explain why Florentine painters made more use of line and Venetian painters more of colour. (Did they? The sophisticated use of colour includes lack of strong colour.) Jargon such as “neural plasticity” and “mirror neurons” is used to explain the “formation of different visual preferences and artists’ deportments.” For example, the profs mention that Europeans such as Leonardo stood before vertical canvases while the Chinese sat before horizontal sheets of silk or paper.
Different strokes for different folks.

Best regards,

Robert

PS: “We can also use neuroarthistory much more widely, both to better understand the nature of familiar artistic phenomena such as style, and to crack so far intractable problems such as ‘what is the origin of art?'” (John Onians)

Esoterica: A sensitive looker, by looking at the art of any age, can “read” energy, power, ignorance, understanding, carelessness, wonder, worship, laziness, honour, fear, humour, bias, denial, stupidity, and senility, among other things.
Living artists evolve and develop by learning to see these sorts of nuances in the works of themselves and others. In the meantime, we all look forward to seeing the posthumous brain-scans of long-empty skulls.

Robert Genn writes a free twice weekly email letter that goes out to creative people all over the world. You can find out about it at www.painterskeys.com