Title: Exploring complexity-entropy, eye-tracking, experience, creativity, familiarity, and emotional responses to 40 paintings of Raja Ravi Varma - father of Indian modern art

Authors: Dyutiman Mukhopadhyay; Sohhom Bandyopadhyay; Eshwar Venkatesh; Sangeetha Menon

Addresses: Consciousness Studies Programme, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru, India; Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Manipal (Bengaluru Campus), India ' Centre for Cognitive Science, Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India ' Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Manipal (Bengaluru Campus), India ' Consciousness Studies Programme, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru, India

Abstract: This study used multi-faceted behavioural and quantitative experimental measures to explore observations of paintings of celebrated 19th-century Indian painter Raja Ravi Varma, widely accepted as the father of Indian modern art. The study tried to trace the different aspects of a subject's emotional and perceptual involvement with his work of art using the emotion classification system in Indian aesthetics based on the Rasa theory. Rigorous analysis was performed to investigate seven hypotheses on art perception and emotion with 40 Ravi Varma paintings featuring 15 different subjects. We looked at various factors like the complexity and entropy of composition, perception based on eye-tracking, art-experience, creativity, familiarity, and emotional reactions. The human eye-tracking data was compared with heat-maps generated through image analysis software. The research provides crucial information about the complex nature of aesthetic experiences and highlights certain limitations of current empirical aesthetics in decoding the subjective experience of art.

Keywords: aesthetic appeal; painting study; complexity-entropy; eye-tracking; art-experience; creativity; art-familiarity; valence-arousal; Raja Ravi Varma; Indian Academic Realism.

DOI: 10.1504/IJART.2024.143134

International Journal of Arts and Technology, 2024 Vol.15 No.2, pp.170 - 207

Received: 19 Jun 2024
Accepted: 08 Oct 2024
Published online: 03 Dec 2024 *

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