Painting and Our Inner World
Subtitle: The Psychology of Image Making (The Springer Series in Adult Development and Aging)
Edition: 1 edition
Publisher: Springer; Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers
Published: March 2003
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 217
ISBN-13: 9780306474088
Subjects: Child & developmental psychology; Painting & paintings; Psychology Of Art; Art; Art & Art Instruction; Developmental - Adolescent; Developmental - Child; General; Psychology & Psychiatry / General; Fine Arts; Personality; Meaning (Psychology); Personality and creative abili; Personality and creative ability; Psychology
First sentence: Of the complex of motives, predispositions. hesitations, and talents that Cezanne may have brought to his pursuit of painting, we are allowed to glimpse at least one clearly: the matter of contact between independent color patches.
Description: "The role of painting as at least a partial expression of the painter's personality is obvious from the differences between very impulsive and very controlled painters - between the paintings of a Picasso, for example, and a Piet Mondrian. These differences have not been looked at in a controlled setting, however. In this book, Machotka sets out to understand the images produced by a broad sample of students and to connect them to the students' inner lives - to their interpersonal relations, their wishes and fears, their impulses, and their inhibitions. Their image making was followed in detail and their personalities were studied in a long clinical interview, producing a rich, individual picture of the style and substance of the inner life of each.

Then the images were grouped into seven types by cluster analysis. The personal data were found to fit the image clusters closely. For example, images with little form and much narration were produced by people with strong compensatory longings, while dense, collaged images with little form and much narration were made by participants who exercised relentless control over one major issue in their life. Other individuals had a strong need to integrate their lives and produce well-formed, well-composed images. As expected, no single motive explained all artistic activity, but the style of the images - such as their inhibited formality, abstractness, or fluid boldness - reflected what could be called the map of each participant's interpersonal world."--Jacket.