The Science behind Why Art Moves Us: An Intro to Neuroaesthetics

I talk a lot about values and why knowing what’s important to you has everything to do with how you make, price, and offer your work into the world. But here's a different angle. I want to look at how your values show up inside the work itself. Not from an art market perspective. From the human one.

I was eight years old the first time I felt it. My grandmother took me to see Emily Carr's forest paintings. I told her I could hear them. I didn't know anything about technique or art history. I just knew her forests felt alive — exactly the way I saw and felt trees myself. I later learned that Carr painted forests as sacred space, inhabited by what she called the unquenchable vitality of trees. My eight-year-old nervous system knew something was true in that work before my mind had any language for it.

That's neuroaesthetics. The study of how the brain and body respond to art. And it confirms what artists have always sensed: your intention isn't a concept. It lives in the work. In what you emphasize, what you refuse, what you leave rough, where you take the risk and where you don't. A viewer meets that through their own system. We feel the difference between something inhabited, and something performed.

This is why values matter before strategy does. If you can't articulate what you stand for, everything becomes negotiable - your time, your standards, your creative spirit. And sooner or later, the work asks for its truth back.

We are living in a moment that needs art to be real. Your work can hold what people can't hold alone.

Want to go deeper? Read the full article over on Substack https://substack.com/@lynnfeasey