The Value of Emotional Engagement
By Keiko Honda, Ph.D., MPH
What is the value in learning to draw portraits? This question goes, unexpectedly, to the heart of the shared roots of art and science. In this essay, I aim to fertilize the soil for growing a new dialogue on the role emotional engagement plays in the relationship between art and science.
I have recently been watching YouTube videos on portraiture. It is fascinating to watch master artists create portraits out of a blank sheet of paper, with only a pencil or stick of charcoal. If done well, the artists can explore their own feelings about the human condition. I always wonder how these artists acquired their skills.
“Open your feeling, Open your senses! The first step is the conversation,”
says a passionate YouTube artist who teaches portraiture. At the instant he is rhythmically drawing a large, very loose shape on a blank sheet of paper, he exclaims,
“This [his arm movement] is emotional engagement.”
Working on composition, by Keiko Honda
Right there, I paused the YouTube video I was watching and replayed that part again and again. There was some dissonance between what I heard and what I saw. I did not expect to harvest deep insight when watching a rudimentary shape being drawn on a large black sheet of paper by the artist I chanced upon on the Internet.
What is he talking about? The YouTube artist explains,
“Enjoy drawing. Rather than rushing into getting drawings done quickly, you need to take your time to know how to see and understand how abstract elements work together to create an art form,”
Simultaneously glancing at his live model, he continues,
“No need to do the proportions yet…… When you are working on composition, it is very important at the beginning to open your feeling — how is the best way to show the personality (of the subject) that you understand.”
He was drawing with brisk, raw strokes. His words surprised and haunted me for days.
Emotional engagement?
Until now, I’ve never thought about drawing as a form of bodily emotion. Who knew? Taking time to “have a conversion” with the subject I am about to draw (mostly photos, sometimes of myself) is something I have never consciously thought of. My emotional engagement was limited. I sometimes felt happy or disappointed with the drawings I finished. I experienced mixed feelings of nervousness and excitement every time I was in front of a blank sheet of paper as if I were facing the great unknown. Is this emotional engagement? The path to understanding portraiture is not yet clear to me.
The YouTube artist proceeds to the next step,
“You move from the outside (the general) gradually coming to the inside. After you are done with the composition, the second stage is measurement. Dividing the shape equally from the top to the lower lip of the mouth into 3 parts, hairline, eye, close to the lower lip. After that, from the hairline to the chin, you can divide equally into 3 parts, eyebrows, nose, and chin. The second measurement is width, from left to right (without ears) should be equal to the length between eyebrows and chin….”
Da Vinci’s proportion, Source: https://anatomymasterclass.com/news/leonardo-da-vinci-on-portrait-drawing
As in science, artists cannot do everything all at once. Process and steps are important in portraiture. As in Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebook, we learn not only proportions applicable to portraiture, but also insight into how to become a truth seeker.
Portraiture is said to blend aesthetics and empiricism, as elaborated in the work of MacArthur laureate sociologist, Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, who proposes portraiture as a method of scientific research, especially artful inquiry. Other scholars are skeptical; however, putting aside academic arguments, portrait drawing can be employed to foster critical thinking, curiosity, openness, discipline, micro-macro connections, and consciousness-raising. These are hallmarks of science as well as essential qualities for human well-being.
In 2019, during the creation of the community forum in Vancouver that focused on the intersection of the arts and earthquake resilience, I learned a great deal about many artists, dead and living, who helped rebuild communities through art-based initiatives. E.g., Naoto Nakagawa drew portraits of 1,000 survivors of the Great North East Earthquake in Japan, known as 1,000 Portraits of Hope, a valuable recording of suffering, loss, survivorship, and human resilience. Even after the project ended, Nakagawa continued to raise awareness and funds to bring children’s art education to the affected area of northern Japan, where schools and teachers were wiped out by the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown. A review of Nakagawa’s work by Robert Zaller eloquently states,
“Where Nakagawa finds visible traces of pain and trauma, he records them, but where he does not he imposes nothing. Trauma, indeed, often masquerades as calm, and understatement is the best access to it. So what one sees is the dignity and, more rarely, the pathos of ordinary people placed in the most appalling of circumstances. Film or photography couldn’t convey this. Only the unfiltered response of the artist’s eye and the direct pressure of his hand, sustained but never distorted by compassion, produces that rarest of impressions: a sense of naked truth.”
I am imagining the deep emotions Nakagawa saw written on the survivors, and how his emotional engagement (i.e., the act of drawing) guided his thoughts, choices, and actions, and how the process transformed him. Emotions affect our agency and behavior, as limbic regions, like the amygdala and hippocampus, play a key role in orchestrating emotional responses and facilitating lifelong learning. I wholeheartedly applaud Nakagawa for bringing his openness, intuition, diligence, and rigor to bear, and allowing his heart to create something new and important for the world to see.
One of our basic human needs is to understand the world around us, and then to share that understanding. In this regard, art and science have much in common. After watching that YouTube video, I realized that I had missed the point that every drawing has a purpose, as I was doing it as a hobby. Much like in scientific research, I should spend some enough time to see whole patterns and explore what it is that I am curious to know and desire to learn before I start working on compositions.
I patiently paused to look at an old photo of myself. What am I seeing and opening to? That YouTube artist’s voice is echoing inside my head, “Open your feeling… how is the best way to show the personality (of the subjects) that you understand?”
What are my subsequent thoughts? What have I been most curious about at a personal and professional level?
My teenage daughter, pencil, by Keiko Honda, 2020
In my old days, in the field of cancer epidemiology, I was going after health disparities in colorectal cancer in the United States. How should disease prevention strategies be organized in a heterogeneous society in which disease incidence rates vary among different groups? This was the opening statement of my first academic publication in the American Journal of Public Health. My broad, initial question eventually narrowed to focus on theoretical modeling of the pathways responsible for the link between social support, interpersonal networks, and cancer prevention behavioral outcomes, leading to a dozen of my following publications. Although I was productive then, I remember many unsatisfying moments. I now question how emotionally engaged I was in my research. Was I passive? What difference would it have made if I had allowed myself to “open my feelings”? Would it have led to breakthroughs?
Recently, I came across an article published in Aeon that articulates how scientists should transform both who they are and what they know by eliciting emotions, especially awe, for their discoveries. Drawing on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (1939) and other empirical arguments, the article comments on this important truth, not only from the perspective of scientists who need to make a leap but also in terms of its likely impact on the wider audience — us.
Emotion does matter and is a vital component of human advancement. I thank that YouTube artist for reminding me again of the value of emotional engagement. For everything we do, we should do with all our hearts.
Originally published at Medium on November 14, 2020.
