Emma Lao

When designing an image there is a multitude of tools that can come in handy when attempting to convey a certain emotion to a viewer. One such tool is Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions, a diagram showing the eight primary emotions and their varying degrees & combinations.

Every image emanates some form of the eight basic emotions by using context. Just like how our brains use context to understand what we are seeing, we are also able to connect to the images based on our own experiences of those emotions. In addition to that, the Gestalt Principles which help give context to what an image’s meaning is as well as the use of color for emotional design induce these emotions further.

While in my previous post I compared images with the same emotion with artists from different countries, I will be comparing images with different emotions from artists of one country now. My aim to show how no matter where you come from, visual design can influence how an artist conveys emotion to a viewer in many different (or similar) ways. Since I have a strong interest in Cambodian history, I will be reviewing three images from Cambodian artists, two post-Khmer Rouge and one modern piece.

“The Last Look” was a painting created by Ngeth Sim capturing the moment when his father was taken away to be killed by the Khmer Rouge. Everything about this image screams terror to me – the terror that he, as a child, must have felt. Just reading this excerpt from Sim’s interview about the painting fills me with enough terror alone, never mind the awe-inducing painting:

“My poor father, at the moment when the Khmer Rouge led you away, I fixed on your face intently. At the bottom of my heart, a thousand thoughts clashed and overwhelmed me. I couldn’t speak. I remained mute in front of them and only the tears flowed down my cheeks. I sensed that I was going to lose you and life left me at the same time that they were taking yours. I did not have the force to protest in front of these torturers, to prevent them from taking you and killing you. Today still, this memory beats against my chest and keeps me from complete happiness. When I think of it, the feeling overwhelms me that I did nothing to return the love that you had given to me. I am truly an ungrateful son. Dearly beloved father, I pray every night that your soul will pardon me.”

Looking at the painting by itself instills terror as well due to its design. The most prominent Gestalt Principle captured in this painting is “common fate” – and their fate, in this case, is a terrible one. The movement in this photo is mostly to the left, but the one man making his “last look” to his son is staring back. The continuity and proximity of the men in line adds to the terror since you know that he was not the only father who was murdered – every single one of the thousands and thousands who were killed had families.

Another element that is highly influential to the emotions is color. In this case, the colors are red, black, and white. Not only is red the color of the party that was executing these men, but it also associated with “fire, violence, and warfare”. White is typically thought of as the color for virtue, but in the East it is more commonly associated with death. It works well in this painting to highlight the center of the image – the man giving the “last look”. The black charcoal that makes the outlines of the men is effective at representing the misery of the victims.

Vann Nath is a Cambodian artist who is well known for his images depicting scenes of torture that he witnessed as a prisoner at Security Prison 21. This painting, however, depicts an alternate reality that he could have experienced had the Khmer Rouge not taken over. Instead of omitting terror, it gives a feeling of peace to the viewer. He explained his vision he had here:

“My picture wishes to show what life ideally can be like in the countryside. The cowherd lying under the tree is free in his heart. He is his own master and does not suffer from oppression or intimidation. He lives honestly by his own labor and in peace and harmony with his own surroundings. He has no fear of anything and is not afraid that anyone will steal his possessions or his animals. It is thus the opposite of my paintings of torture and sadness. While painting this painting I was happy and hopeful. The Tuol Sleng paintings I painted to document what had happened but their painting was difficult for me.”

As far as the Gestalt Principles go, there a few that influence the feeling of peacefulness Nath was aiming for. The figure-ground which is supposed to determine the background and foreground is somewhat muted here since the colors and lines flow into each other in a relaxed way. Everything in this image is connected as well – the man, the cows, the nature, the clouds – they are all calm and together, instilling a feeling of grounding and connection.

The colors in this photo are all natural and analogous to the other; as I mentioned above, everything in the photo seems to flow together. Each color still gives a certain feeling to the viewer – the green grass promotes growth and stability, the blue sky promotes calm and safety, the white clouds and nearly-white flowers promote comfort and elegance. When looking at all of these attributes, it makes you sad to know that none of these where possible in the Cambodia that Nath actually experienced. He aimed for the exact opposite and he achieved it.

The final image I chose is by a modern Cambodian painter and is much more lighthearted as it has nothing to do with the genocide. Instead it depicts four performers who are sharing their art with the world. To me, this image emanates joy.

One Gestalt Principle that is present in this image is connectedness. Every figure is touching another and the lines are flowing as if they are coming from the same place. To me it seems that these people are sharing a strong link with each other as they play their music. There is also an element of simplicity to their faces; they are very bare-bones, but people are able to see them as faces due to perceptual constancy which allows humans to understand what something is due to its context.

This is the most abstract photo of the bunch and uses colors in an unrealistic, but fun way. The red in this photo is signaling youth, the accents of blue is promoting openness, the bit of yellow is adding happiness, and the black is adding a bit of edginess. With this “edge” I imagine these to be late-night or street performers. It is interesting to note that this painting also has a strong red and black color scheme much like the first, but the more vibrant red and the solid lines make it more lighthearted.

Emotions can be conveyed by artists of all backgrounds and in many different ways because we all share the same experience of being human. While images may mean more to some than others based on their life, some basic design principles can easily give the artist the ability to connect emotionally to any viewer.

_{^{Annenberg Learner. “Discovering Psychology: Updated Edition – Sensation and Perception” WGBH Educational Foundation, Feb. 2001, https://www.learner.org/series/discovering-psychology/sensation-and-perception/.
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Cao, Jerry. “Web design color theory: how to create the right emotions with color in web design.” The Next Web, 7 April 2015, https://thenextweb.com/dd/2015/04/07/how-to-create-the-right-emotions-with-color-in-web-design/. Accessed 4 Sept. 2020.
Chapman, Cameron. “Color Theory for Designers, Part 1: The Meaning of Color.” Smashing Magazine, 28 Jan 2010, https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/01/color-theory-for-designers-part-1-the-meaning-of-color/. Accessed 8 Sept. 2020.
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It is not news that images can spark a variety of emotions in the human soul – this is why people spend hours and hours in an art museum, are inspired by beautiful sunsets, and buy that product just because it feels “right”.

Emotional design, that is designing a product, art piece, or image in the hopes to elicit an emotional response from a viewer, has become extremely popular. The Interaction Design Foundation even suggests that “you can use those emotions to either create loyalty or to drive a customer to take action.” What many look to for understanding what emotions to appeal to is Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions: a diagram outlining the eight basic primary emotions and their derivations & combinations.

In this post I will be exploring the emotion of joy in its different intensities through three different oil paintings. They each employ different methods of conveying the same basic emotion even though they were created years and miles apart.

The first image of interest is “Serenity” by Elena Den, a Ukrainian artist. The image, while objectively blurry, is immediately recognizable as a horizon over a body of water. On a fundamental level this image is no more than a bunch of paint that has been dabbed, brushed, and scraped along a canvas. However, our brains are capable of taking in this sensory information and contextualizing it based on our past experiences – something that is called “top-down processing” in visual perception theory.

There are also a few Gestalt Principles that help us recognize what this image is. One is the principle of “common fate” – we are able to see that the clouds are clouds because of the direction they are going, and that the bottom third of the image is water since it is going in a uniform and opposite direction. We also know that the clouds are all clouds because of their proximity to one another.

But our mind goes beyond simply recognizing it as a horizon. We also feel the serenity the artist has sought out from within us. The main aspect of this painting that brings this out is the color palette. According to this article by Jerry Cao each color promotes certain emotions – and every single color in this painting can be linked to serenity. The blues promote calm & openness; the red promotes importance and youth; the orange promotes friendliness; the white promotes virtue & simplicity. The scheme is analogous, meaning that it has only complimentary colors (all of these colors can be found on one end of the color wheel) which bring out the best of each color, and the most of the emotion each color emits.

The next image and level of emotion is “Joy” by Taher Abdel Azeem, an Egyptian artist. Similar to the previous, the painting is almost abstract – the lines are not solid and flow into each other. Still, because of the brain’s ability to perceive images based on context (especially when that image resembles a human) the viewer can see the image of a child hula-hooping.

The Gestalt Principles can outline why this is easily identifiable. For one, the enclosure around the girl is made clear from the circles of yellow and blue – they not only show us that she is a different object, but that she is the main object. The action of her hula-hooping can be seen by the continuation of movement through her body. From her head, to her arms, to her hips and finally her feet we can see the movement.

To me, this painting brings out the most visceral response within me. As explained in the paper by Donald Norman and Andrew Ortony this is “gut-reaction” is one of three main emotional responses that a designer can hope to elicit in a viewer. This is due to the nostalgia of childhood joy – seeing a child at play has brought out the feelings I have when reflecting on the good times of childhood.

Again, color has a big impact on the emotions of this image as well. The deep blue conveys safety, an emotion that is invisible yet predominant throughout childhood. The yellow gives a blast of happiness and enthusiasm – again, emotions that are constant in a healthy childhood. Her shorts are red, a color signifying youth. Not only are the colors themselves good indicators of these emotions, but the fact that they are in a triadic scheme makes for a very balanced image where these emotions can shine.

Finally we have reached the most intense version of joy – “Ecstasy” by Matthew Parrish, an early 20th-century American artist. Unlike the other two this portrait is based in realism – the clouds, mountains, ocean, and of course woman in the center are all closely resembling reality.

One Gestalt Principle that helps our brains understand this painting are figure-ground: the woman is obviously the forefront of this piece because she is clear as day in the foreground, while the middle and background get progressively foggier. There is also lots of continuity in this image. The mountains and cliff-side can be followed in both its parallels and colors, and the same goes for the clouds in the sky.

What gives this painting the most intense feeling of joy is three aspects: the colors, the direction, and the openness. The main colors in this painting are blue (calm, openness), red (power), and white (virtue). While the left side of the image is full of objects, the right (more specifically, the upper-right) is clear and open. The woman in the painting is looking out into this openness, motioning away from all the business behind her, and surrendering herself to the vastness of the sky with the look of ecstasy on her face.

While in different styles and by artists from across the globe, the emotion of joy is able to be conveyed through art by utilizing the principles taught by psychology and color theory. In my opinion, above all else, experience is what makes images not only easy to understand, but to feel. By knowing the beauty of a sunset, the joy of being a child, and the feeling of freedom I was able to bring my past into these photos, and with it, the joy that came form those experiences.

_{“Putting Some Emotion into Your Design – Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions.” Interaction Design Foundation, 2020, https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/putting-some-emotion-into-your-design-plutchik-s-wheel-of-emotions. Accessed 4 Sept. 2020.
Annenberg Learner. “Discovering Psychology: Updated Edition – Sensation and Perception” WGBH Educational Foundation, Feb. 2001, https://www.learner.org/series/discovering-psychology/sensation-and-perception/.
^{Bonner, Carolann. “Using Gestalt Principles for Natural Interactions.” Thoughtbot, 15 Sept. 2014, https://thoughtbot.com/blog/gestalt-principles. Accessed 4 Sept. 2020.}
Busche, Laura. “Simplicity, symmetry and more: Gestalt theory and the design principles it gave birth to.” Canva, https://www.canva.com/learn/gestalt-theory/. Accessed 4 Sept. 2020.
Cao, Jerry. “Web design color theory: how to create the right emotions with color in web design.” The Next Web, 7 April 2015, https://thenextweb.com/dd/2015/04/07/how-to-create-the-right-emotions-with-color-in-web-design/. Accessed 4 Sept. 2020.
McLeod, Saul. “Visual Perception Theory.” SimplyPsychology, 2018, https://www.simplypsychology.org/perception-theories.html. Accessed 4 Sept. 2020.}

Images are what makes up a vast majority of today’s communication. Not only do we have devices that allow us to see a never-ending supply of visual stimulation, but those very devices are capable of creating images with ease. Just because you can, however, does not mean that it will be good. As Seth Gitner points out in the first chapter of his book Multimedia Storytelling for Digital Communications in a Multiplatform World, those who can create images with intention are those who make visual storytelling a true art. To explore the art of visual storytelling, I will explore ten different images that tell a compelling story.

The first image that tells a story is The Cycle of Terror and Tragedy by Graydon Parrish. When I began my research, this is the first thing that came to mind. I saw this painting in 2017 at the New Britain Museum of American Art and was awe-struck by every detail in this emotion-filled portrait of post-9/11 America.

Starting in the middle are the two twins standing on an island before a smoky and ruinous New York City. They are blindfolded; oblivious and naked to the world. To the left are children holding the two planes that would crash into them, also blindfolded. They show the innocence of the country before the tragedy. Next to them is a dying man with his face frozen in horror and the back of his hand to his heart, the opposite of what a pledge to the US flag typically entails. To the right side of the twins are crying, yelling, and cowering women, signifying how terrified and vulnerable the country felt after 9/11. Then is an old man silenced by a medical mask, a new blindfold stemming from his hand to cover the youth’s eyes. I am unsure of this evaluation, but I see it as the terror and pain from the older generation who was attacked making the next generation blind again – blind to the possibility that it could happen to them.

This painting is a strong example of dramatic storytelling (according to Chapter Two of Essentials of Visual Communication by Bo Bergstrom) – it has a beginning (the children with the planes), a middle (the dead man, vulnerable twins, and grieving women), and end (the blindness being passed on to the next generation) within a closed environment of a destroyed New York City.

“In Voluptas Mors” is an interesting pick for me since I grew up seeing it on a postcard on the fridge at a friend’s home – and it has always haunted me. The title in English means “Voluptuous/Desirable Death”. It is a photo of a live sculpture of the female form being used to create a skull that entices one to the idea of death. There are seven women in the photo, but the only one with her face exposed is looking up and away, as if she is passively letting death take her.

I see two interpretations for this image – one is the “Desirable Death” signifying a trap for men seeking lustful pleasures without thinking of the consequences, even if it is death. Another could be that death is freeing – as free as the woman in the photo looks. This image is an example of using contradictory emotions intentionally to shock and captivate the viewers, an idea explored in the introduction of Andrew Losowsky’s Visual Storytelling.

Speaking of moths, “In Voluptas Mors” is actually an element of one of my favorite movie poster designs. Spoiler/gross warning ahead. The moth on the poster of The Silence of the Lambs represents the film’s main antagonist – Buffalo Bill – as he is transforming from a man to a woman by kidnapping and skinning female victims. In this context, the Dalí artwork is being used to show both a desire to kill and a desire for the female form.

The abnormal use of color, specifically in the eyes of the protagonist Clarice, give an eerie feeling to the piece. This again is an example of contradictory elements being used to draw in a viewer.

This next image is the cover art of one of my favorite books, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami. This image is abstract to those who are unfamiliar with the book, but after reading the novel it shows the story of the book perfectly clear.

The novel follows the story of a man attempting to discover why his tight-knit high school friend group suddenly pushed him away. Each line of the hand represents a group member – their names each had a component of the coordinating color within it, so that is the name they went by in their friend group (Aka, Ao, Shiro, and Kuro). Tsukuru, the main character, was always an odd one out – he always felt “colorless”. Nonetheless every member came together to make a working hand. There is also a ongoing montra in the book about a story of a man who had a jar of fingers and one day lost them and felt as if he lost himself – showing that once the group disbanded, each member was lost.

When the book sleeve is taken off you see a intricate map of the Japanese railway system (which Tsukuru works for). Every line of color has a stop symbol, referencing to Tukuru’s visits, or stops, to each member of the group that he makes throughout the book. While the cover may not mean much to a person who is unfamiliar with the book, it holds a lot of significance as the reader begins to understand it in the context of the story. As book cover designer Peter Mendelsund said in his presentation at the Graphic Design Meetup: Design is Storytelling, “design does in fact exist in time and it does unfold – it unfolds for the viewer in time even though it is static.”

This painting by Norman Rockwell tells a story – and a true one – in a blunt and effective way. The walls with slurs written on it and tomatoes thrown against it making violent splatter patterns, while shocking to the viewer, are obviously no bother to the little girl in the photo who is looking straight ahead. While surrounded by men to protect her it is as if they are invisible, all faceless, adorning bland colors and identical poses, she is walking confidently to her goal of equal education.

The movement and composition of this image are what makes it give this girl such a brave look – it is framed so that she is the moving forward no matter the hate around her, and doing so alone as the only subject with a face shown.

At Eternity’s Gate is one of the most emotional self-portraits I have seen. Just by looking at the image you can see a man cowering, cold-toned colors surrounding him despite the fire, alone in the world. The use of color and space stand out most to me – the fact that the tones are cold and the painting is composed so that you can see that the man is in an empty room alone adds to the emotion of grief.

This image is significant to me because I know the girls featured. This was taken on a health survey to Bawa, Cameroon by a member of the Bawa Health Initiative, a non-profit organization co-founded by my father to provide clean drinking water, bed nets, health education, and even a clinic to a village in Cameroon.

A blog post by Jade Lien entitled The Four Principles of Visual Storytelling outlines some key elements that visual storytellers, especially in the field of non-profits, should consider. Two of the four principles are met in this image: sensory and relevancy. The sensory mark is hit by the emotion in the girls’ eyes as they sit on the ground in their old, worn out clothes. The relevancy mark is hit because these are the children that are befitting from BHI’s work, and they happen to be sitting in front of the water filter provided by BHI that they use to filter out water-borne diseases.

This image is a screenshot from my film Not Broken: Freedom Ride. This is my favorite still from the film – even those who have no idea what this is about can understand that the woman in the picutre is experiencing the raw joy that can only happen when holding a puppy (a puppy that just became hers). This shot is an example of capturing the moment. As explained in Seth Gitner’s book from earlier, “the moment” is when action and emotion come together to capture a story though a still image.

This photo, even to someone who knows nothing about Cambodian history, can be haunting. The eeriness of having an unidentifiable silhouette creep though rows and rows of faces of people wearing the same expression, hairstyle, and clothes tells enough. The fact that every one of those people in the pictures were tutored and killed shortly after it being taken adds so much more depth to this image.

This is the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, a primary school building-turned-prison during the Khmer Rouge where an estimated 20,000 people were imprisoned. There are only four known survivors. To me, the silhouette of this image is the most haunting part. That person, who is likely a tourist, could have very well have been any of the people who were photographed and killed if they had been in Cambodia in the late 70’s.

The final image I chose is from one of my favorite documentary photographers, Dorothea Lange, This image is a part of her work with the FSA to help let the American public see the poverty that was the reality for many farmers in 1936. The worry on the mother’s face, the shyness of her two children, the dirt on her baby’s barley-visible face all work together to tell a heart-breaking story of struggle. This image hits all four of Jade Lien’s principles for non-profit images – it is authentic, emotional, relevant, and character-driven, which is probably why Lange is considered as one of America’s greatest photographers.

Now that you have seen these examples of images that tell a story, keep an eye out as you consume visual media for images that compel or interest you. Are they able to tell an entire story within one frame? I know that I am excited to keep a watchful eye from here on out.

Follow my blog for more weekly posts on my exploration of visual storytelling.

Bergstrom, Bo. Essentials of Visual Communication. London, Laurence King Publishing, 2008.
Gitner, Seth. Multimedia Storytelling for Digital Communicators in a Multiplatform World. New York, Routledge, 2016.
Hewitt, Cooper. “Graphic Design Meetup: Design is Storytelling.” YouTube, uploaded by Cooper Hewitt, 5 Dec. 2017, https://youtu.be/Gc42K5P6dEY.
Lien, Jade. “The Four Principles of Visual Storytelling.” Action, 21 Dec. 2019, https://actiongraphicsnj.com/blog/4-principles-visual-storytelling/.
Losowsky, Andrew. Visual Storytelling. New York, Gestalten, 2011.