Metaphors are an undeniable part of many forms of art and they hint at the underlying conceptualisation that takes place in the silent conversation between an art piece and its perceiver. Abstract art, in particular, requires the viewer not only to analyse the colour palette and the shapes of the strokes but to subconsciously react to the underlying structures that often define the metaphors. After introducing a few cognitive theories involved in perception and knowledge transfer the paper introduces the reader to the painting “Beneath the Paint”. It is an abstract acrylic painting that plays on the two conceptual metaphor structures 'UP is GOOD' and 'DARK is BAD' and by presenting them in contradiction force the viewer to subconsciously choose its primary conceptualisation.
Human expression in music, literature and the arts often rely on the audience to fill in the blanks. The abstraction of music encourages the listener to allow tones and melodies to ‘speak’ to the audience. Writers use for instance metaphors, hyperbole and synecdoche to force the reader to absorb more information than what the words and expressions contain themselves. In the arts, in particular during and the time after the impressionistic era, expression took the character of unconventional and liberal use of colour, shape and even the subject itself was suddenly up for interpretation. Art was no longer a method to capture a scene, or to tell a narrative, but to more strongly impose the viewer with an impression.
Looking at these phenomena from a scientific point of view it has been made clear
that the human brain is a skilled interpreter, that both searches and finds patterns in
any situation, even where patterns are non-existent, a phenomena called apophenia. This
imaginative ‘hide and seek’ game of pattern recognition has been suggested not only to
manifest in visual interpretations such as that in the arts but also to translate into higher
levels of cognition [
Pattern recognition connects the perceived external world with internal mental
constructs so as to generate order in chaos. Gestalt psychology [
While gestalt laws point out how visual information may be ‘completed’ in uncertain
scenarios, how symbols (such as words, figures, paintings etc.) gain their meaning and
can refer to a real-world concept is still a topic for debate. Sticking to the shape of
triangles, in linguistics, this problem is often discussed in association to the semiotic
triangle [
In fact, while there are theories as to how human cognition forms and allows for
conceptualisation, there exists no consensus on the view of cognition. Throughout the last
century, the development of (modern) psychology research advanced the investigations
on human cognition from the purely speculative in philosophy and theology, to more
empirically founded theories. The perception of the human mind went through many
paradigm shifts and several different theories as to how the components of concepts relate
to each other were introduced [
While embodied cognition is an umbrella term of different levels of devotion to the hypothesis, the general idea is that all human cognition can be traced, through the brain, back to the sensorimotor experiences. The concept (as denoted in the semiotic triangle) is the collected experiences that an individual has with the real world referent. The representation is the way in which this mental construct is communicated and remembered. For example, I could write the word ‘banana’ on a piece of paper to capture the meaning of it. However, in my mind, the ‘meaning’ of a banana is most likely the gathered attributes from my experiences with them, such as its particular visual appearance, its scent or its taste. All of which are increasingly difficult to represent and is therefore translated into symbols such as ‘banana’ that we can use to communicate with. For increasingly complicated concepts such as ‘finance’ or ‘marriage’, our experiences are less structured based on the concrete physical experiences. Despite this we often use spatial language to express increasingly abstract concepts 2.
Indeed, one of the major reasons for the emergence of the modern view of embodied
cognition was to provide means to explain why it is that human language to such a large
degree is rooted in spatial language [
While image schemas are relationships such as VERTICALITY, SCALE and
SOURCE PATH GOAL, these skeletons can be fleshed out to metaphoric structures such
as: “UP is GOOD/DOWN is BAD”, ‘BIG is STRONG’ and ‘PROGRESS is
MOVEMENT FORWARD’ [
Another common metaphor is ‘LIGHT is GOOD/DARK is BAD’ which is highly grounded in the visual domain of embodied experience. As in the words by The Rolling Stones where the world is to be painted black to match the colour of the heart: “I see a line of cars and they’re all painted black, With flowers and my love, both never to come back”. In terms of image schematic conceptual structures, in the literature there currently exists no direct mapping to dark and light, and SCALE is the most appropriate connection to make.
It has been argued that human interpretation and conceptualisation of metaphors
both in linguistics and in the arts are unconsciously processed on these kinds of
conceptual structures and skeletons. What then happens if there is a violation of metaphoric
structure?
2See [
Image Schema
Figure 4 depicts “Beneath the paint”, an abstract painting. The painting embodies both the VERTICALITY image schema with long coloured strokes, and therefore allowing for the interpretation of the metaphor ‘UP is GOOD/DOWN is BAD’, while simultaneously capturing scaling from dark to light associated with the metaphor ‘LIGHT is GOOD/DARK is BAD’. As both metaphors have the structure ‘X is GOOD/Y is BAD’ a conflict emerges as the painting forces the viewer to merge UP with DARK and DOWN with LIGHT. In consequence, UP becomes BAD and DARK becomes GOOD, and DOWN becomes GOOD and LIGHT becomes BAD.
In language, these kinds of conflicts are often unconventional and provocative. In real life scenarios, these metaphors often rely on a temporal change. For instance, a sunrise is a perfect example of LIGHT going UP and a sunset of LIGHT go DOWN. Whether or not one could transfer this analysis to claim that a sunrise holds more conceptual ‘positive tone’ than a sunset is, of course, a completely different matter. In order to learn more about the extent of how conceptual metaphors such as those present in “Beneath the paint”, are incorporated into human conceptualisation requires further studies. Regardless, using this kind of conceptual metaphor violation provides an interesting addition to different artistic areas to force the viewer to unconscious and unintuitive interpretations that range out from the conventional sphere.
Figure 4. Beneath the paint