Planting Paddy watercolor 6"x8"
I am experimenting with painting fast and loose as well as challenging myself not to fill my painting with pattern and color, leaving some white of the paper untouched. Earlier I had painted the same scene from rural India in
Another Season. Here, I further simplified it. I don't know if I like one better than the other.
What makes us like one painting better than another? And what happens in the brain when we see a painting that we really like? NYU's Neural Science and English Department's Dr. Edward Vessel, Nava Rubin and G Gabrielle Starr's poster presentation
This is your Brain on Art shows which parts of the brain light up when there is an aesthetic response (strong liking) vs a simple preference to a painting and to what extent is an aesthetic reaction mediated by specific emotional response. Dr. Vessel found there was strong response in multiple areas of the brain when subjects saw a painting they really liked. The responses were triggered in left medial prefrontal cortex, left substantia nigra and left hippocampus. Even as the subjects picked different paintings as their most liked painting, the same set of areas in the brain responded to their varied selections. 'Beauty' in art seems to engage cognitive, memory and emotional circuits in the brain. Check
here if you like an easy to understand explanation of the poster.