art as expression essay

Turning Thoughts and Feelings into Art

Artists are primarily thought of as makers. And yes, of course we make stuff. But we are also thinkers and feelers. We think. And we feel. Deeply . And I believe the thinking and feeling are the most important parts of an artist. More important than the making. Because our thinking and feeling is what spurs the making and leads to what we make.

That’s why I write these essays and that’s why I draw in my sketchbook. I have all these thoughts and feelings swirling around in my mind, constantly bumping into each other and trying to connect with other things. It can be overwhelming if we don’t have an outlet for all those thoughts and feelings.

Seeing Our Thoughts + Feelings

Often, as artists, our thinking can run over the other aspects of being human; actually, it can run over all the other aspects of being human. It can run over the being part. We can get so focused on doing, on making, on thinking, that we lose our awareness of what’s going on. I’ve realized now that art (for me, and maybe for you), is the key to becoming aware.

Making art isn’t a direct way to change our thinking or change ourselves. Art is a way of seeing ourselves. A way of seeing our inner world—our thoughts and beliefs, our feelings and emotions, our loves and aversions. Through making art we can learn about our inner world.

Sometimes we’ll discover mundane or silly thoughts like, ‘hey, mushrooms are interesting’. Other times we’ll discover something profound, like thought patterns inside us that we never knew were there. Sometimes those thought patterns are destructive, narrow-minded, and so habitual that we were unaware of them for years. Art can illuminate this inner side of us, and make us more aware of ourselves.

Turning Thoughts + Feelings into Art

The thoughts and feelings in our minds are constantly flowing and surging. It can be exhausting, and sometimes we get swept away. But making art allows us to stand, even for a brief moment, in the middle of that river and see what’s flowing around us.

And that seeing is key. If we’re able to see these inner thought patterns, they can begin to change. We can weed out destructive beliefs and habits to bring in more acceptance and love. We can see our thoughts as just thoughts, and we can use those feelings to make art, instead of allowing them to set up camp in our brains and take over.

Drawing each day, looking into ourselves each day, we can see those parts inside we may have otherwise not noticed. We can become familiar with how our mind works and how our hands create from it. And this process leads to satisfaction in our art and more acceptance and confidence in ourselves.

A Real Life Example

Yesterday, I went through this entire process, unknowingly and perhaps unwillingly. I had been feeling off all day but didn’t really realize it. I was just floating through my day in a general state of “meh”. I tried to break out of the funk: I took a nap, went on a walk, ate a snack… nothing worked. The funk was still there. It was one of those times when you just don’t want to do anything—not even draw. The only thing I could put my finger on was that I felt “meh”, and nothing more specific than that. I was floating in a river of thoughts and feelings but completely unaware of what I was thinking or why I was feeling this way.

And so, not wanting to do anything else, I sat down to draw. The theme for #MightCouldDrawToday this week, chosen this morning by me, is Villains. That choice should have given me a little clue to how I was feeling that day, but ya know… unaware. So I sat down on the couch with my Posca markers and sketchbooks, and within a few minutes of considering what to draw, it came to me—Cruella De Vil. Something about that character clicked and I instantly went from not wanting to draw at all, to a deep desire to draw this character.

And so, for the next good while, I lost myself in drawing. I dropped out of the outer world and dropped into my sketchbook.

As I was drawing Cruella’s facial expression, it dawned on me. This is how I feel. I feel like Cruella de Vil right now. And not just any Cruella de Vil, because there are many sides of every villain—I feel like THIS one. This one that I just drew. And suddenly, it was as if I had seen what was inside me. All the vague feelings of “meh” and the thoughts swirling so fast I couldn’t catch them… everything came into focus.

I now had an awareness of how I was really feeling in that moment.

To be clear, art isn’t magic. My Cruella mood didn’t immediately transform into happy-puppy-mood just because I became aware of it. Awareness doesn’t solve all our problems unfortunately. But the drawing gave me a breather from the rush of thoughts and feelings, a moment of clarity, and a step in the right direction. Like people speak about meditation, I believe experiencing awareness of our thoughts over and over can lead to big changes, both in our art and in our lives.

Try it Yourself

The next time you feel down, discouraged, or “meh”, try using art to look inside. Take some time to draw your thoughts and feelings, if only for a few minutes. Don’t go in with expectations of a revelation and don’t judge your drawing as it goes along. Maybe you’ll realize something profound, and maybe you’ll just realize you’re grumpy.

Whatever it is, just draw. And let it all come out just the way it is.

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Exploring How Art Impacts Our Lives

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Published: Aug 31, 2023

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Art and Expression

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11 Expression in Art

Aaron Ridley is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Southampton in England.

Published: 02 September 2009
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It is natural to assign a significant role to artists in artistic expression, and perhaps to do so by extrapolating from the role we assign to people when they express themselves in everyday, non-artistic contexts. When, for instance, we say of someone's face that it expresses pleasure, we ordinarily take it that the pleasure revealed there is the person's own pleasure, and that the expression on their face is to be explained by the pleasure that they feel. In ordinary, non-artistic cases, then, we take the expression to reveal the state of the person, and the state of the person to explain the expression. The temptation is to suppose that the same must be true of artistic expression. The temptation, that is, is to suppose that a work of art expressing anguish both reveals and is to be explained by the artist's own anguish. But things may not be as straightforward as that.

1. Introduction

That the expression of emotion is among the principal purposes or points of art is a thought with a pedigree stretching back at least as far as the Ancient Greeks. Nor, so stated, is it a thought that many have wanted to oppose. Even the staunchest cognitivist or moral improver has granted that expression is one of the points of at least some art, however much he or she may have wanted to insist on the pre-eminence of other points. Serious disagreement arises only when an attempt is made to say what is actually meant by ‘expression’.

For the purposes of this essay, I want to set up an Everyman figure. He believes what I imagine more or less anyone would believe upon thinking about artistic expression for the first or second time. His view is this. As far as the artist is concerned, expressive art arises because the artist feels something. Perhaps he feels it now, at the moment of creation; or perhaps he creates out of ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’, as Wordsworth put it; or perhaps he just feels an urge to give vent to something that he knows is ‘in there’ somewhere. Whichever of these it is, though, artistic expression expresses something about the way the artist feels. In expressing what he feels, the artist creates an object of a certain sort, a work of art—and this object shows in some way what that feeling is or was. It does this, perhaps, by describing the feeling; or perhaps it does it by evoking the occasion for the feeling—by being what T. S. Eliot called the ‘objective correlative’ of the feeling; or perhaps it does it by sharing some property or set of properties with the feeling. However it does it, though, the art object somehow indicates or exhibits what the artist felt. The object that the artist creates is then experienced by an audience. Often, the audience is moved or made to feel things by the object. Perhaps the audience's feelings are directed to the artist (in sympathy, say, or in admiration); or perhaps the audience feels what the artist felt—perhaps, in Leo Tolstoy's words, the audience is ‘infected’ by the artist's feeling; or perhaps the audience is stirred by the object into feelings entirely its own. Whichever way it is, the experience of an expressive work of art is standardly or frequently a moving one. Taken together, these thoughts capture Everyman's position, or proto-position, perfectly well: artistic expression involves an artist's feeling something, embodying it in his work, and often moving his audience as a result.

Everyman is entirely right, of course—even if his position as it stands is unacceptably vague. I'll try to suggest towards the end of this essay how his position should be taken. But first it will be useful to attribute to him a more problematic way of understanding his view, a way that has a good deal in common, to put it no higher, with at least one canonical position in the literature. Leo Tolstoy, in militantly Christian retirement from writing two of the greatest novels of the nineteenth century, defended the following claim in his short book, What Is Art?

To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced and… then by means of movements, lines, colours, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling so that others experience the same feeling—this is the activity of art… Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that others are infected by these feelings and also experience them… Art is [thus] a means of union among men joining them together in the same feelings … (Tolstoy 1996 : 51)

Tolstoy's statement here is flat and apparently unambiguous. The function of art is to transmit feelings from artist to audience; the role of the artwork is simply that of a conduit through which the artist's feelings, as it were, flow. Elsewhere in What Is Art? there are indications that Tolstoy might have had something rather subtler than this in mind, and there are passages in the book that barely make sense except on the assumption that he did have. But for present purposes these details can be put aside. Let us simply take it that Tolstoy did indeed mean what, in the quoted passage, he appears to say.

This way of understanding expression—call it the transmission model—is clearly consistent with Everyman's main intuitions. But he may find on reflection that it offends, or at least grates against, some of his other intuitions. As it stands, the transmission model construes the work of art as a mere vehicle for the feeling transmitted through it, as no more than a means to the end of getting the feeling from the artist to the audience. In principle, then, the work of art could be replaced by anything else that got the feeling through as effectively. If Edvard Munch had been a gifted chemist, for instance, he might, instead of painting The Scream , have concocted a drug which produced in those who took it feelings identical to the ones expressed in the picture: The Scream need never have been painted.

Everyman's intuitions should begin to rebel at this point, for several reasons. First, the present way of describing things leaves one with no reason at all to value The Scream for itself, as a painting. Second, it strikes one as odd to think that any other painting, let alone a drug, could possibly have made available the exact experience to be had from looking at The Scream . And third, when one looks at The Scream , the anguish one sees is the anguish of that face, of that figure, captured in just those lines and colours. To think of the anguish as being somehow detachable from what Munch painted would surely be to falsify at least one important aspect of the experience that his picture offers. In each of these respects, it seems, the transmission model construes the relation between the artwork and the feeling it expresses in far too extrinsic and contingent a manner, a thought sometimes put by saying that one cannot, in the end, understand or do justice to a work of art if one insists on treating it simply as an instrument of some kind—for instance, an instrument for conveying feelings from artist to audience.

The transmission model is to be resisted, then. But its shortcomings are instructive, and they tell us quite a lot about what an acceptable way of cashing out Everyman's intuitions would have to look like. Above all, they tell us that an acceptable account of artistic expression must relate the work of art to the feelings expressed in such a way as to make the work's role in expressing those feelings an essential rather than an incidental feature of the sort of communication between artist and audience that artistic expression consists in. In the next three sections I shall attempt to spell out that constraint by considering, first, the relation of artist to expressive artwork, second, the relation of audience to expressive artwork, and third and most briefly, the artwork itself.

Here is a commonly offered reason why the temptation should be resisted, stated by Peter Kivy in the context of musical expression:

many, and perhaps most, of our emotive descriptions of music are logically independent of the states of mind of the composers of that music, whereas whether my clenched fist is or is not an expression of anger is logically dependent upon whether or not I am angry. It is unthinkable that I should amend my characterization of the opening bars of Mozart's G-minor Symphony (K.550) as somber, brooding, and melancholy, if I were to discover evidence of Mozart's happiness… during its composition. But that [on the present hypothesis] is exactly what I would have to do, just as I must cease to characterize a clenched fist as an expression of anger if I discover that the fist clencher is not angry. This is a matter of logic. (Kivy 1980 : 14–15)

Kivy's point here (following Tormey 1971 : 39–62) is partly to distinguish between something's express ing an emotion and its being expressive of that emotion: in the former case, the expression stands to the state of the person whose expression it is in the kind of relation I sketched out above (it reveals it, and is explained by it), whereas in the second case it does not. In the second case, where something is expressive of an emotion (Kivy invites us to think of the sad face of a St Bernard dog), the characterization we offer is ‘logically independent’ of the state of mind of the person (or dog) whose expression it is. The fact that he would not withdraw his description of the opening bars of Mozart's 40th Symphony upon discovering that its composer was happy when he wrote it, any more than he would withdraw his description of the St Bernard's face as ‘sad’ upon finding that the dog was cheerful, is taken by Kivy to indicate that musical expression—and artistic expression more generally—must standardly be of this latter, ‘logically independent’, sort: that such expression is not, in other words, to be understood by simply extrapolating from ordinary, non-artistic cases of expression.

By itself, this argument is hard to assess, since it is unclear how strong the conclusion is meant to be. Specifically, it is unclear what Kivy's talk of logical independence is supposed to amount to. The argument can be read in either of two ways: a weaker, which claims only that artistic expression is sometimes ‘logically independent’ of the state of the artist, and a stronger, which claims that artistic expression is essentially , or in its paradigm cases, logically independent of the state of the artist. Let's take the weak reading first (perhaps encouraged by Kivy's remark that it is only ‘many, perhaps most’, cases that exhibit the logical independence that he has in mind).

Imagine someone who successfully feigns a sombre expression upon hearing of a not wholly unwelcome death. To say that his pretence is successful is to say, first, that his expression does not reveal what he feels, but suggests something else instead, and second, that his expression, although perhaps to be explained by what he feels (by his reluctance to appear callous, say), is not to be explained by his being in the sombre state that his expression indicates. Thus, while his face is certainly expressive of sombreness, it does not express any sombreness of his, since he feels none. Here one might say that his expression is ‘logically independent’ of his state of mind, and decline to withdraw one's characterization of his face as ‘sombre’ even once his pretence has been discovered. In saying this, however, one would certainly not be saying that sombre facial expressions are, in general, logically independent of the states of mind of their owners. For what makes pretence of this sort possible is the background of genuine instances of expression against which it takes place. It is only because genuinely sombre people genuinely do look sombre that a feigned sombre expression can be mistaken for one genuinely expressing sombreness. In the present case, then, we are dealing with a thoroughly parasitical, atypical instance—one that is atypical precisely in exhibiting a disjunction between facial expression and state of mind. So, whatever degree of logical independence this instance shows, it shows also a background of logical dependence that is both more extensive and logically prior: it shows, that is, that people's expressions are not typically or standardly independent of their states of mind. The question for Kivy is now this: why prefer to assimilate Mozart's G-minor Symphony to a dog than to a person? Why understand the sombre expression of the symphony as analogous to a ‘sad’ St Bernard's face rather than as analogous to the ‘sombre’ face of a person who feigns melancholy? Why not suppose, in other words, that the sombreness of the Mozart symphony as written by a happy Mozart points up and exploits a background of sombre music written by sombre composers in exactly the way that the sombre face of the feigner points up and exploits a background of sombre people looking sombre? Kivy offers no reason for his preference. He therefore gives no grounds to believe that musical or artistic expression is ‘logically independent’ of the states of mind of artists, except, perhaps, in atypical, parasitic cases. The weak reading, then, fails to yield a conclusion of any general significance at all; and it is certainly far too weak to establish the impossibility of understanding artistic expression by extrapolating from ordinary, non-artistic cases of expression.

Despite claiming that it is only ‘many, perhaps most’, cases that exhibit a ‘logical independence’ of expression from the artist, it is clear that Kivy really has in mind the stronger reading of his argument: in the remainder of his book he treats ‘logical independence’ as standard or paradigmatic. It is also clear that, to have a chance of going through, the stronger reading must somehow circumvent the difficulty posed by the expressive feigner. What the stronger reading needs to establish is this: that a happy Mozart could have written a sombre G-minor Symphony even if no sombre music had ever been written by a sombre composer. If this can be established, there will be no warrant for supposing, as one must suppose in the feigning case, that any apparent instance of ‘logical independence’ really trades for its point on a deeper and logically prior background of dependence. Kivy himself, as I have already said, gives us nothing to go on here. But the claim that there could be sombre art even if none had ever been created by a sombre artist does have a certain prima facie plausibility that any corresponding claim made of feigned facial expressions would, at least on the face of it, lack. It is worth asking why that might be.

The answer, I think, is this. A feigned facial expression of gloom depends upon a background of genuine facial expressions of gloom, where a ‘genuine’ expression is one that someone wears because he feels gloomy (his expression both reveals his gloom and is explained by it). That much is surely true. But it is easy to move from this thought to a second: that a feigned facial expression depends upon a background, not merely of genuine facial expressions, but of natural facial expressions—a slippage, if it is one, perhaps facilitated by the fact that the ‘artificial’ is opposed to both the ‘natural’ and the ‘genuine’. It is this second thought, which may or may not be true, that is responsible for making it seem as if artistic and everyday expression must be radically different in kind. For art—unlike a person's face, one might say, or its configurations—is artificial, heavily dependent upon convention, and so not, one might think, a ‘natural’ mode of expression at all. To the extent, then, that expressive feigning depends upon a background of expressive ‘naturalness’, feigned artistic expression, unlike feigned facial expression, would appear to be impossible; it would therefore also appear—unlike, say, the face of a St Bernard dog—to be of no use in an explanation of how an artist, feeling one thing, might create a work of art expressive of something else. Which seems to put us quite close to the claim made by the strong reading, that artistic expression is essentially, or in its paradigm cases, ‘logically independent’ of the feelings of artists, and so to the more general claim that artistic expression cannot be understood by extrapolating from ordinary, everyday cases of non-artistic expression.

None of this, in my view, is at all persuasive. If the move from the genuine to the natural is, as I suspect, unwarranted—if, that is, there is no reason to think that expressive feigning depends upon a background of, as it were, naturally genuine expression rather than (merely) genuine expression—then we are no closer than before to the conclusion required by the strong reading. But even if the move is warranted—and suppose for a moment that it is—it still could not secure the required conclusion without major additional argumentation. Two things would have to be shown: first, that every kind of ordinary, non-artistic expression that can be feigned is, in the relevant sense, natural; and, second, that no paradigm or standard case of artistic expression is natural in that sense. I strongly doubt that either, and still less both together, could be shown in a non-vacuous way. The first argument, for instance, would have to account for the fact that a good deal of ordinary, everyday—and eminently feignable—expression is linguistic, leaving it to the second argument, presumably, to explain why, if the conventions that define a spoken language are indeed, and despite appearances, ‘natural’ in the relevant sense, those governing artistic expression are not. Or, to put the point the other way round, if the second argument were to succeed in showing that artistic conventions are somehow conventional ‘all the way down’, the first argument would have to have shown that no feignable piece of everyday expression is conventional except within certain, permissibly natural, limits. It isn't hard to see how such arguments are bound to degenerate into circular, question-begging exercises in stipulation: the ordinary just is the natural; the artistic just is the conventional; and so on.

There is nothing in any of this, I suggest, to offer the smallest hope of rescue to the strong reading of Kivy's position. There is nothing, in other words, to encourage the thought that what a work of art expresses is, in the standard or paradigm case, ‘logically independent’ of the state of the artist. I have laboured this point for a number of reasons, but chief among them has been a concern to head off the idea that, because artistic expression is a special case of expression, it must be a very special case indeed, perhaps even sui generis . Nothing in the discussion so far suggests that that is true. And certainly, the mere fact that, as Kivy puts it, ‘It is unthinkable that I should amend my characterization of the opening bars of Mozart's G-minor Symphony… as somber… if I were to discover evidence of Mozart's happiness… during its composition’ has no such extravagant consequence. Nor, except for the purpose of defusing talk of logical independence, need that fact drive one to wonder whether Mozart might not have been feigning. For the truth is that there is a perfectly ordinary, everyday explanation for Kivy's (quite rightly) declining to withdraw his characterization: that the evidence of the symphony itself trumps whatever imaginary evidence Kivy thinks of himself as discovering—just as, for instance, the publicly manifest evidence of Hitler's megalomania would trump any imagined ‘discovery’ about his modest, self-effacing nature in private. And, just as no discovery about Hitler's private life would make one think that his megalomania was somehow ‘logically independent’ of him, so there is no sort of discovery about Mozart—and what could it be? a letter? a diary entry?—that would make plausible the radical splitting off of him from the expressive properties of his work. What Kivy has overlooked, in short, is the homely possibility that an artwork itself may be evidence—and perhaps the best sort of evidence there is—of what an artist really felt (or of what emotional/imaginative state he was in).

The reason that Kivy doesn't take up this possibility, I suspect, is not any deep desire to assimilate Mozart's symphony to a dog's face. It is, rather, a wariness about deflecting appreciative and critical attention away from the work of art, where it belongs, and on to the historical person of the artist. The worry, crudely, is that if one takes a work of art to express—to reveal and to be explained by—an artist's state of mind, then the question ‘What is expressed here?’ may look as if it has to be answered in the light of evidence about the artist's state of mind, which might have nothing whatever to do with the work of art that he has actually produced. And this worry is fuelled by some of the things that artists have said about what they do. Tolstoy, as we have seen, talks of art as a set of ‘external signs’ intended to convey to an audience feelings that the artist ‘has lived through’, so encouraging the thought that the question ‘What do these external signs stand for?’ is best settled by asking what feelings the artist has, as a matter of fact, lived through. And here is Wordsworth, in the preface to Lyrical Ballads : poetry, he says,

takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. In this mood successful composition generally begins…. (Wordsworth 1995 : 23)

And T. S. Eliot in his essay on Hamlet :

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. (Eliot 1932 : 145)

If Wordsworth tempts one to ask not what a poem expresses, but what emotion existed ‘in the mind’ of the poet before composition of the poem began, then Eliot, in much the same way, tempts one to ask just what the ‘particular emotion’ was, for which the artist may or may not have succeeded in finding an ‘objective correlative’. Like Tolstoy, Wordsworth and Eliot are here deep inside transmission territory, and so are both in real danger of minimizing or misconstruing the role of the work of art in artistic expression.

To this extent, Kivy is right to be wary of the role assigned in expression to the artist. But what is needed to keep the artist in his place, as it were, is a good deal less than—indeed, just about the opposite of—a demonstration of the logical independence of what a work of art expresses from what an artist felt. What is needed, as we have seen, is simply a reminder of the ordinary, everyday fact that actions speak louder than words—that what one does, how one behaves, reveals how one feels in a way that nothing else can. From the fact that the making of a work of art is standardly a peculiarly rich, reflective and elaborate sort of action, therefore, one should conclude that, standardly, a work of art offers the best possible (‘logical’) evidence of an artist's state, and so that, standardly, what a work of art expresses reveals that state, and is to be explained by it. This conclusion places the following constraint on any attempt to cash out Everyman's intuitions in a plausible way: that the artist must be seen as present in his work, much as a person must be seen as present in his behaviour, rather than as separate from it, behind it, or, above all, as ‘logically independent’ of it.

3. Audiences

Everyman's proto-position envisages artistic expression as involving an audience's being moved in some way. There is at least one thing that he had better not mean by this. He had better not mean that a work of art expresses whatever it makes its audience feel. Many considerations point to this prohibition, but the following is the simplest and most direct: a work of art can make one feel X precisely because one recognizes that it expresses Y, where X and Y are different. Suppose I feel an odd sense of uplift upon looking at The Scream (things could be worse); nothing in this makes The Scream expressive of such uplift. No more than in an ordinary, everyday case of expression, then, is what is felt by a witness of an expression to be taken, automatically, as what is expressed. (Your expression of gladness might sadden me, after all.) If an audience's feelings are indeed involved in artistic expression, then their involvement is going to have to be accounted for in some more subtle way than this.

It is possible, of course, that the proper response to the role of audiences' feelings in artistic expression is one of scepticism. One might acknowledge that people are, as a matter of fact, frequently moved by the experience of expressive art, and yet still deny that this has any significance for an understanding of artistic expression. It may be, for instance, that what a person feels upon experiencing a particular work of art is determined in some way by the associations that that work has for him: so, for example, Beethoven's 6th Symphony makes someone feel vulnerable because it reminds him of his nanny, while Apocalypse Now makes him smirk because he remembers what went on in the back row when he first saw it. In cases such as this, it is clear that the person's responses, however significant they may be for him, are altogether extrinsic to any issues concerning the expressive characteristics of the works that occasion them, and so are irrelevant to any attempt to understand artistic expression.

The same may be true, if somewhat less obviously, in a different kind of example. It may be the case, as a number of people have argued (see e.g. Feagin 1996 ), that, unless one's experience of a given work of art is coloured and informed by one's emotional responses to it, one will not be in a position fully to understand it. So, for instance, it might plausibly be suggested that a person at a good performance of King Lear who was not appalled by Gloucester's blinding would have failed to appreciate the true character of the events portrayed. If this is right, it would suggest that a certain kind of emotional engagement may be essential to some kinds of aesthetic appreciation. But nothing in the example shows that such engagement or response need have any bearing on expression specifically. It may well be, in other words, that audiences are moved in a host of diverse and valuable ways by expressive works of art without that fact being such as to contribute to an understanding of artistic expression. To the extent that that is the case, Everyman's intuitions about audiences will have to be set aside.

How, then, might a place be secured in an account of expression for an audience's responses? The foregoing suggests this: what an audience feels will be relevant to an account of artistic expression, first, if what it feels is related in some intrinsic way to what a work of art expresses, and, second, if its feeling that way is essential to its grasping the feeling expressed by the work. The first requirement rules out the second and third of the cases just discussed. Not only are responses based on private association not intrinsically related to what works of art express, they are not intrinsically related to works of art in any way at all; while responses that help one to see what a work is about, although related in the right sort of way to the work of art, need not be related to it as an expressive object. The second requirement serves, among other things, to rule out the example discussed at the beginning of this section. My imagined response of uplift is certainly intrinsically related to The Scream 's expression of anguish: but I need not feel uplifted in order to grasp the anguish expressed there. But the second requirement is also meant to do more. It is meant to rule out the following kind of possibility.

Suppose that whenever I experience an expressive work of art I feel the feelings it expresses. I feel anguish whenever I look at The Scream , for example, and am seized by a sombre, brooding melancholy whenever I listen to the opening bars of Mozart's G-minor Symphony. I am, in fact, exactly the sort of person that Tolstoy has in mind: I am invariably ‘infected’ by the feelings that works of art express. There is no question here that my responses satisfy the first requirement. I feel what I feel because of the feelings expressed in the works. But nothing in the example as it stands suggests that this fact about me, however much it might make my aesthetic experiences interesting or intense, is integral to an analysis of artistic expression. There are two reasons for this. First, my response may be peculiar to me; it may, in the end, be no less idiosyncratic to respond in this way than to respond on the basis of private association. So no conclusions of a general sort about expression can be drawn from the fact that that is how my responses are. Second, there is no reason to think that someone who responded differently, or who did not respond by feeling at all, would be missing anything. Their experience of expressive art would not be the same as mine, but that shows nothing about their capacity to notice or appreciate the features of artworks to which I respond by feeling what they express. This example, therefore, fails to satisfy the second requirement set out above—that what an audience feels must be essential to its grasping what an artwork expresses.

The only way in which an audience's responses can possibly be integral to an analysis of artistic expression, therefore, is if at least some of those responses are integral to grasping at least some of what, or at least some aspects of what, works of art can express. This is effectively to envisage a corollary of the position outlined in the previous section: a kind of response that (i) reveals the expressive properties of a work for what they are, and (ii) is explained by the work's having those properties. The idea here is close to something John Dewey once said:

Bare recognition is satisfied when a proper tag or label is attached, ‘proper’ signifying one that serves a purpose outside the act of recognition—as a salesman identifies wares by a sample. It involves no stir of the organism, no inner commotion. But an act of perception proceeds by waves that extend serially throughout the entire organism. There is, therefore, no such thing in perception as seeing or hearing plus emotion. The perceived object or scene is emotionally pervaded throughout. (Dewey 1980 : 55–6)

To respond without feeling might be to ‘recognize’ certain of a work's expressive properties; but to grasp those properties in their full richness and particularity is to ‘perceive’ them. A position of this general sort has been gestured towards recently by a number of writers, most often perhaps in the context of musical expression. So, for instance, Malcolm Budd has suggested that an imaginative engagement with music can enable ‘the listener to experience imaginatively (or really) the inner nature of emotional states in a peculiarly vivid, satisfying and poignant form’ (Budd 1995 : 154); Jerrold Levinson has remarked that perceiving ‘emotion in music and experiencing emotion from music may not be as separable in principle as one might have liked. If this is so, the suggestion that in aesthetic appreciation of music we simply cognize emotional attributes without feeling anything corresponding to them may be conceptually problematic as well as empirically incredible’ (Levinson 1982 : 335); and Roger Scruton has pointed out that ‘there may be a sense of “what it is like”… When I see a gesture from the first person point of view then I do not only see it as an expression; I grasp the completeness of the state of mind that is intimated through it’ (Scruton 1983 : 96, 99) (see also Ridley 1995 : 120–45, and Walton 1997 : 57–82).

There is little consensus in the current literature about the significance, or even the possibility, of such responses. Many prefer to regard an audience's feeling as essentially independent of the feelings expressed by artworks, and so as incidental to any account of artistic expression. The discussion in the present section suggests that that position is considerably more plausible than its analogue concerning the feelings of artists. For what it's worth, though, I want to cleave to Everyman's position. Just as I may sometimes have to put myself in your shoes—try to feel the expression on your face from the inside, as it were—in order to grasp how things really are with you, so, it seems to me, I sometimes get the full expressive point of a work of art only by responding emotionally to it—by resonating with it, even. Again, then, I am inclined to think that extrapolation from ordinary, everyday cases of expression is the most promising way of attempting to understand artistic expression.

4. Artworks

I argued in the introductory section that an acceptable account of artistic expression must relate a work of art to the feelings expressed there in such a way as to make the work's role in expressing those feelings an essential rather than an incidental feature of the transaction between artist and audience. With respect to the artist, this comes to the thought that, in standard cases, the expressive properties of a work of art both reveal the artist's state and are to be explained by it. With respect to the audience the position is perhaps less clear, but I have suggested that, in certain cases at least, the expressive properties of a work of art are both revealed by, and explanatory of, the responses of an audience.

These considerations give us a good overall indication of what is required in order to make Everyman's position a plausible account of artistic expression. They also, of course, tell us the kinds of things that need to be said about artworks in such an account, namely, that artworks must be understood as objects having expressive properties capable of revealing and of being explained by the feelings of artists and (perhaps) of explaining and of being revealed by the feelings of audiences. Beyond that, however, there is very little of a general nature to be said. The various forms of art differ hugely from one another in the kinds of resources they make available for artistic manipulation, and so differ hugely from one another in the kinds of property that, in one context or another, can be expressive, and in what way. At this point, then, the attempt to arrive at a full understanding of artistic expression must devolve on to the theories of the individual arts, where, for instance, one might give an account of the expressive nature of dance by relating the gestures it contains to the gestures of human beings when they express their feelings; or one might give an account of the expressive nature of certain paintings by appealing to atmosphere or ambience—to features that have an expressive charge whether in or out of art; or one might give an account of the expressive nature of music by relating its movements to the movements of people in the grip of this or that feeling—for example rapid, violent music for frenzy or for rage; or one might give an account of the expressive nature of poetry by highlighting locutions or rhythms that are characteristic of ordinary, spoken expressions of feeling; and so on. The problems and possible solutions are quite distinct for each of the various arts, even if, with respect to each of them, one is essentially trying to answer the same questions: in virtue of what features is this artwork expressive? And: what is it that someone might attend to, recognize, or perceive in a work of this kind that would lead him to characterize it in expressive terms?

5. Expression Proper

So how, finally, might Everyman's proto-position be filled out so as to give a satisfactory—and suitably general—account of artistic expression? The answer, it seems to me, lies in R. G. Collingwood's treatment of the issue in his wonderful, though wonderfully uneven, book, The Principles of Art .

Collingwood's basic claim is that what is involved in artistic expression is nothing more than what is involved in ordinary, everyday instances of expression. Indeed, he goes so far at one point as to say that ‘Every utterance and every gesture that each one of us makes is a work of art’ (1938: 285); and this, while surely overstating the case, is indicative of the seriousness with which he takes the continuity between the artistic and the non-artistic. For him, the purpose of expression—in or out of art—is self-knowledge. One finds out what one thinks or feels by giving expression to it. At the beginning of the process of expression, Collingwood holds, the artist knows almost nothing of what he feels:

all he is conscious of is a perturbation or excitement, which he feels going on within him, but of whose nature he is ignorant. While in this state, all he can say about his emotion is ‘I feel… I don't know what I feel.’ From this helpless and oppressed condition he extricates himself by doing something which we call expressing himself. (Collingwood 1938 : 109)

The artist attempts to extricate himself from his ‘helpless and oppressed condition’, then, by trying to answer the question ‘What is it I feel?’ When he first asks this question, there is no answer to be given: his state is inchoate, and nothing specific can be said about it. If he is successful in his efforts, however, the question eventually receives its answer, and this is given in the expression that the artist produces. The feeling that the artist expresses, therefore, is both clarified and transformed in the process of being expressed, so that ‘Until a man has expressed his emotion, he does not yet know what emotion it is’ (Collingwood 1938 : 111); which is why ‘the expression of emotion is not [something] made to fit an emotion already existing, but is an activity without which the experience of emotion cannot exist’ (1938: 244). On this account, then, an emotion is not so much revealed for what it is by receiving expression: it becomes what it is by receiving expression.

The emotion becomes what it is through being given form, through being developed into something specific. In this way, the fully formed emotion and the expression it receives are indistinguishable from one another—indeed, they are one and the same: it is in virtue of having been given that form that the emotion is the emotion it is. It follows from this that the identity of an emotion expressed in a work of art is inextricably linked to the identity of the work of art. There is no possibility, in other words, of regarding the emotion expressed as something essentially detachable from the work in which it is manifest; there is no possibility, that is, of thinking of the emotion expressed as something that might just as well have been expressed in some other way or in some other work of art (or captured, indeed, in some chemist's cocktail).

Collingwood's insistence on this point marks his position off in the strongest way from that of the transmission theorists (with whom he has been oddly often confused); and he develops the point further: ‘Some people have thought,’ he says, that

a poet who wishes to express a great variety of subtly differentiated emotions might be hampered by the lack of a vocabulary rich in words referring to the distinctions between them… This is the opposite of the truth. The poet needs no such words at all… To describe a thing is to call it a thing of such and such a kind: to bring it under a conception, to classify it. Expression, on the contrary, individualises. (Collingwood 1938 : 112)

Expression, then, distinguishes between feelings that might be described in exactly the same terms as one another, and transforms them into the highly particularized feelings we encounter in successful works of art:

The artist proper is a person who, grappling with the problem of expressing a certain emotion, says, ‘I want to get this clear.’ It is of no use to him to get something else clear, however like it this other thing may be. He does not want a thing of a certain kind, he wants a certain thing. (Collingwood 1938 : 114)

Description, by contrast, would yield only ‘a thing of a certain kind’. The distinction between expression and description, therefore, between arriving at ‘a certain thing’ and arriving at ‘a thing of a certain kind’, serves both to make a point that is important in itself and also to emphasize the distance between Collingwood's conception of what an artist expresses and the conceptions suggested in the remarks of Tolstoy, Wordsworth, and Eliot considered earlier. Tolstoy's ‘feeling’ that an artist ‘has lived through’, Wordsworth's emotion ‘actually exist[ing] in the mind’, and Eliot's ‘particular emotion’ are each, because construed as graspable independently of the work of art in which they are to be expressed, the stuff of description; not one of them is more than ‘a thing of a certain kind’.

On Collingwood's account, the artist arrives at self-knowledge in the relevant sense when he succeeds in transforming an unformed jumble of unclarified feeling into ‘a certain thing’. The fact that he does not—cannot—specify in advance what that thing is to be is not an indication that the business of expressing oneself is somehow random or accidental:

There is certainly here a directed process: an effort, that is, directed upon a certain end; but the end is not something foreseen and preconceived, to which an appropriate means can be thought in the light of our knowledge of its special character. (Collingwood 1938 : 111)

Knowledge of its ‘special character’ is precisely the end upon which that process is directed. The artist feels his way; he says to himself ‘This line won't do’ (Collingwood 1938 : 283), until, at last, he gets it right, and can say ‘There—that's it! That's what I was after.’ Nor is this kind of ‘directed process’ an unusual one, special in some way to the creative artist. It is an entirely familiar and everyday sort of process. Anyone who struggles to say clearly what he means, for example, is engaged in it: the struggle is directed to the end of clarifying a thought; but until the struggle has been won, no one, including the person doing the struggling, can say what, precisely, that thought is—if he could say what it was, the process of expression would already have been completed (an insight that Collingwood owes to Croce, 1922 ). This is perhaps the most significant of the ways in which Collingwood regards artistic expression as continuous with ordinary, everyday acts of expression: both may be deliberate, yet neither aims at an independently specifiable goal.

It will be apparent that Collingwood's account as I have sketched it here exactly satisfies the requirements outlined in the above section on artists. It is because the artist has succeeded in expressing himself that the work of art has the expressive character it does have; and the artist's emotion is revealed, uniquely, for the ‘certain thing’ it is by the expressive character of the work he produces. Collingwood also intends to satisfy the requirements relating to audiences, although his efforts here are expectedly more equivocal. He insists, for instance, that artists and audiences are in ‘collaboration’ with one another: the artist treats ‘himself and his audience in the same kind of way; he is making his emotions clear to his audience, and that is what he is doing to himself.’ And he cites approvingly Coleridge's remark that ‘we know a man for a poet by the fact that he makes us poets’, suggesting that when ‘someone reads and understands a poem, he is not merely understanding the poet's expression of his, the poet's, emotions, he is expressing emotions of his own in the poet's words, which have thus become his own words’ (Collingwood 1938 : 118). These thoughts culminate in the following passage: no man, he says, is ‘a self-contained and self-sufficient creative power’. Rather, ‘in his art as in everything else’,

[man] is a finite being. Everything that he does is done in relation to others like himself. As artist, he is a speaker; but a man speaks as he has been taught; he speaks the tongue in which he was born… The child learning his mother tongue… learns simultaneously to be a speaker and to be a listener; he listens to others speaking and speaks to others listening. It is the same with artists. They become poets or painters or musicians not by some process of development from within, as they grow beards; but by living in a society where these languages are current. Like other speakers, they speak to those who understand. (Collingwood 1938 : 316–17)

If these comments, taken together, do not quite add up to a picture in which an audience's feelings reveal and are to be explained by the expressive character of the artwork that prompts them, they do at least come close; and it is certainly consistent with Collingwood's overall account that he should have endorsed such a picture. It is hard, after all, to see what else he might have had in mind when he said that someone might express ‘emotions of his own in [a] poet's words, which have thus become his own words’.

Collingwood's account of artistic expression represents a rather full working out of Everyman's proto-position within the constraints that I have outlined. The expressive artist is indeed seen as present in his work, rather than as standing, complete with his independently specifiable feelings, behind his work; and the responsive audience, in discovering what Collingwood calls ‘the secrets of their own hearts’ in his work (1938: 336), are plausibly to be construed as feeling what they feel because of the work, and as grasping what the work expresses because of those feelings. Consistently with the generality of his account, moreover, Collingwood has very little to say in addition about artworks and their specific expressive properties. A defence of his reticence on this score has been provided in Section 4 above.

6. Conclusion

It has sometimes been claimed that expression is definitive of art, usually by a band of so-called Expression Theorists, discussed under that label in the secondary literature. Tolstoy is one of these, and so is Collingwood. The secondary literature standardly goes on to refute the ‘Expression Theory’ allegedly espoused by marshalling a set of counter-examples to show that something can be a work of art without being in the least expressive. It is possible that this tactic is effective against Tolstoy. He certainly appears to think that art can be defined as expression, and to think so, the ambiguities of his position notwithstanding, in a way that makes him at least apparently vulnerable to the sort of counter-example usually offered. Collingwood, however, is immune to this tactic. He does identify art with expression: ‘art proper’, as he calls it, simply is expression. But when one recalls that what he means by this is that ‘art proper’ is the clarification of an artist's thoughts and feelings—that a work of ‘art proper’ is ‘a certain thing’ rather than ‘a thing of a certain kind’—the character of his position becomes plain. What works of ‘art proper’ have in common is that they are indeed expressions: but this is just to say that their common feature is that each one is, uniquely, what it is—and beyond that, if the position outlined here is right, there is nothing more of a general character to be said. That this conclusion follows from Collingwood's version of Everyman's account of expression in art strikes me as yet another reason to think very highly of it.

See also : Art and Emotion ; Art and Knowledge ; Value in Art ; Music .

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