The Language of Feeling: Artists Who Paint Pure Emotions

What if a painting could speak directly to your soul without showing you a single recognizable thing? What if color and form alone could make you feel joy, melancholy, or transcendence as powerfully as any story ever told?

This is the profound question that has driven some of history's most revolutionary artists, and continues to inspire contemporary painters today. These visionaries discovered that emotion itself could be the subject of art, not just its inspiration.

Beyond Personal Expression: When Emotion Becomes the Subject

There's a crucial distinction in the art world that often goes unnoticed. Many artists paint from emotion, channeling their personal struggles, joys, or anxieties onto canvas. But a select group of artists paint emotion as their subject matter, deliberately crafting visual experiences designed to evoke specific feelings in viewers.

Think of Edvard Munch's "The Scream": a powerful work that depicts anxiety and suffering through recognizable imagery. This represents one approach to emotional art. But some artists took a more complex path, simultaneously drawing from their own intense emotional experiences while consciously crafting works designed to evoke universal feelings in others.

The Pioneer: Kandinsky's Emotional Architecture

Wassily Kandinsky laid the theoretical foundation for this approach in his revolutionary 1912 book Concerning the Spiritual in Art. The Russian artist believed that art should function like music, communicating directly with the human soul without representational forms.

Kandinsky developed a systematic approach to color and emotion, possibly influenced by his synesthesia, a neurological condition where senses overlap. For him, bright blue evoked the sound of a flute and feelings of calm, while yellow suggested trumpets and excitement. His vibrant abstractions like Composition VII were designed as visual symphonies, carefully orchestrated to stir viewers' inner emotions.

This was revolutionary: the idea that specific arrangements of color and form could reliably elicit corresponding emotional responses, creating a universal language of feeling.

Spring Light (Green) (2023) - Emma Godebska

The Science of Color and Emotion

Abstract Expressionism: The Complex Arena of Feeling

The post-World War II era brought new urgency to emotional painting. Abstract Expressionists, grappling with existential anxieties and influenced by psychology, saw the canvas as an "arena" for emotional expression. Many of these artists navigated intense personal emotional cycles, including bipolar disorder, which profoundly influenced their work. Yet they transcended mere personal expression to create art that spoke to universal human emotions.

Within this movement, two distinct approaches emerged:

Action Painters like Jackson Pollock used the physical act of painting itself as emotional expression: dripping, splashing, and dancing around canvases. Pollock, who experienced intense mood cycles throughout his life, channeled his personal emotional turbulence into a revolutionary painting method that simultaneously expressed his inner state and created powerful emotional experiences for viewers.

Color Field painters like Mark Rothko took a different approach, creating carefully constructed environments designed to evoke specific emotional states through vast fields of luminous color. Yet this methodical approach coexisted with Rothko's own struggles with depression and emotional intensity, creating a fascinating paradox of deliberate technique born from lived emotional experience.

Rothko: Master of the Emotional Sublime

Mark Rothko exemplifies the complex relationship between personal emotional experience and intentional emotional art. While navigating his own cycles of depression and emotional intensity throughout his life, Rothko simultaneously perfected the art of painting pure emotion for others. His stated goal was to express "basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, and doom" through color relationships alone.

Rothko's personal emotional struggles informed his deep understanding of human feeling, yet his approach was methodical and intentional. He understood that scale and color profoundly impact the psyche. His paintings were deliberately large to envelop viewers, creating intimate encounters that bypassed intellectual analysis. Through meticulous layering of thin paint washes, he created colors that seemed to breathe and shift, perhaps reflecting his own experience of emotional flux while serving his greater purpose of creating universal emotional encounters.

The ultimate realization of his vision is the Rothko Chapel in Houston, a spiritual space where visitors sit in contemplative silence, surrounded by his near-monochromatic paintings, experiencing art as pure emotional communion. This represents the culmination of an artist who transformed personal emotional knowledge into transcendent art for others.

The Silence Under The Water (2025) - Nikolaos Schizas

Contemporary Emotional Painters: The Living Tradition

This powerful tradition of painting emotion continues today through contemporary artists who have made feelings their primary subject matter. Unlike some of their predecessors who navigated intense personal emotional cycles, many contemporary emotional painters approach their subject matter through conscious exploration rather than personal necessity. At IdeelArt, we're proud to represent several artists who carry forward this profound legacy:

Kyong Lee, a Korean artist based in Seoul, has created one of the most systematic and comprehensive exploration of emotion through color in contemporary art. Following a profound personal loss in 2011 that left her temporarily unable to feel color or find words, Lee embarked on an extraordinary journey of post-traumatic growth through art that continues to evolve today. 

Her monumental ongoing series "Colors as Adjectives" (begun in 2012) comprises 446 distinct combinations to date, each representing a unique pairing of adjective and color created through an intensely personal process. Lee makes a crucial distinction: "The emotions I know and the emotions I feel are distinct. Though there are many beautiful and elegant adjectives and colors, I only blend the emotions I have personally experienced and felt." Each painting features the adjective subtly embossed in the same color as the monochrome, creating what she describes as "whispering" words that "replace the place from which images are removed." This foundational work serves as the framework underpinning her entire artistic practice, with Lee adding new combinations each year.

With remarkable versatility and methodical brilliance, she has built her entire body of work using this emotional color palette as her constant foundation, creating through an impressive variety of styles: the geometric precision of "Emotional Color Chart," the lyrical poetry of "Chapter" series, the minimalist elegance of "Lines," and her newest "Sinneswelt" ("Sensory World") series, which uses water as a fluid medium to expand the very nature of color and transcend the limitations of her self-imposed color palette.

This consistent vocabulary ensures that despite frequent stylistic changes, her entire inventory maintains remarkable coherence. As Lee explains, "This foundational work will continue as long as I remain sensually alive," making her practice a living, breathing documentation of human emotional experience through color; Sometimes poetic, sometimes minimalistic, sometimes geometric, but always systematically beautiful and deeply personal.

Flag nb 2 (2024) - Paul Richard Landauer

Paul Landauer, an Austrian artist working in Belgrade, creates incredibly powerful expressive lyrical abstractions. Born in Vienna in 1974, Landauer experienced a profound awakening in 2018 when, as he puts it, "it took me 44 years to wake up." This pivotal moment transformed his understanding that "turning to art as a life project is not just an idea, or mood, but simply a question of survival." After years as a creative director in the commercial brand industry, he made a radical leap into what he calls "an infinite adventure of exploring, learning and revealing."

Working on museum-quality canvases in impressively large formats, Landauer describes his practice as "digging through layers of emotions that have piled up over a lifetime." Having embarked on deep introspection through various exploratory techniques, he brings an unusually clear understanding of his emotional states to his work, creating paintings that resonate with extraordinary depth and authenticity. Fully dedicated to his art, his goal is to "translate subjective experiences into visual art works that give space to the viewers to find in them a reflection of their own life and experiences."

Nikolaos Schizas, a Greek painter based in Barcelona, has emerged as one of the most prolific and sought-after abstract painters of his generation. Despite beginning his professional career only in 2020, this entirely self-taught artist has produced over 550 works, with an astonishing 450 pieces already collected. For Schizas, art serves as both passion and necessity; A meditative practice that provides balance and focus as someone with ADHD.

His approach to emotional exploration is remarkably dynamic, evolving through multiple concurrent series that could be described as a "growing tree of inspiration." Rather than abandoning past techniques, each new series grows organically from previous ones, weaving together established elements with fresh innovations in a continuous creative evolution. From his foundational splash paintings using 30cm-wide brushes on wet canvases, to sweeping multicolored gestures, refined monochromatic immersions, and ethereal metallic minimalism, each technique offers him different emotional territories to explore.

What makes Schizas quite unique among emotional painters is that he never abandons any series; Instead, he continues to paint across all his techniques simultaneously, choosing which approach to use based on his current emotional state and what each series brings him. Some works are playful and rejuvenating (like his pop and tactile "Sweeties" series), while others are deeply contemplative (his all-over monochromes in blues, greens, and purples), and still others offer dynamic expression (his large brushstroke works). This parallel evolution of multiple approaches allows him to match his artistic expression precisely to his emotional needs at any given moment, expressing what he calls "unconscious feelings and repressed emotions" through varied aesthetic languages that remain "fresh, vibrant, and dreamlike." 

Solstice 2 (2019) - Brooke Noel Morgan

Brooke Noel Morgan, a Nashville-based multimedia artist, brings a deeply spiritual dimension to emotional painting. For Morgan, being an artist means "living from my soul," and her creative journey, spanning teaching, photography, interior curation, poetry, painting, and sculpture, reflects a profound understanding that "life, the living, is the most creative thing I do." Working from her minimalist, peaceful Nashville sanctuary, Morgan has cultivated what she describes as a communion with Mother Earth, channeling this deep connection into abstract organic forms that seem to breathe with natural wisdom. Her approach to emotional expression transcends individual experience, rooted in the belief that "my truth somehow connects to your truth... the truth of collective humanity having this life/earth experience."

Morgan's paintings serve as what she calls "beauty as a balm," created for healing, "my healing, your healing, our healing." Her work explores the full spectrum of human emotion: "joy, pain, loss, love, fear, grief, anger, sadness, seduction, and everything in between", not as separate experiences but as facets of what she describes as "a vast, spacious womb of Love that holds us exactly as we are." Inspired by wabi-sabi principles, her abstract forms seem to emerge from a place of deep stillness and universal connection, inviting viewers into contemplative spaces where the boundaries between self and cosmos dissolve. In Morgan's hands, emotional painting becomes a form of spiritual practice, where each work serves as a bridge between the individual soul and the infinite mystery of existence.

Emma Godebska, a French artist working in Nîmes, carries forward one of art history's most distinguished lineages while forging her own contemplative path in emotional expression. Descendant of the legendary Godebski artistic dynasty, including the mythical Misia Godebska, "Queen of Paris" and muse to Vuillard, Bonnard, and Ravel, Godebska represents the contemporary flowering of a family tree that has nurtured creativity for over a century. Recently celebrated in the major retrospective "La Saga Godebski" in Nîmes, this artistic heritage flows through Godebska's's work not as burden but as profound understanding of art's spiritual dimension. 

Her practice embodies what critic Martine Guillerm describes as a journey “from accumulation to simplicity," where the quest for painting's essence passes through purified gesture and minimal pictorial language. Working on white surfaces with an almost obsessional focus on traces - traces of different colors, traces of emotion, traces of presence - Godebska creates what appear as calligraphic signs floating in contemplative space. Her technique involves a delicate dance between paint dilution and pigment accumulation, exploiting transparency effects while seeking balance between tension and release, concentration and spontaneity. The result resembles sculptural volumes suspended in time and space, where superimposed elements create depth that speaks as much about temporal experience as spatial presence. 

With formal simplicity that echoes the Neo-Abstract Expressionist tradition, Godebska's works confront viewers with their own emotional expressiveness, inviting them into what Guillerm calls "a spiritual journey." Each painting becomes a meditation on the Here and Now, capturing light, feeling, and fleeting moments through a minimalist vocabulary that transforms emotional experience into pure visual poetry. Specific emotions may not be strictly Godebska’s subject matter, but her art is and an open-ended canvas for the viewer's personal feelings.

Emotional Color Change 53 (2025) - Kyong Lee

The Universal Language of Feeling

What makes these artists, both historical and contemporary, so compelling is their ability to transform emotional experience into universal communication. Whether drawing from personal emotional intensity like Rothko and Pollock, or consciously exploring emotional territories like our contemporary artists, they all share a commitment to making emotion itself the subject of their work.

The most powerful emotional painters often embody this duality: they understand emotion intimately, whether through personal experience or conscious exploration, yet transcend the purely personal to create works that speak to universal human feelings. They provide the framework for an emotional journey, but the final experience becomes a collaboration between artist and viewer.

This is why abstract emotional painting remains so powerful and relevant. In our increasingly complex world, where words often fail to capture the full spectrum of human feeling, these artists offer something precious: a direct, non-verbal connection to our deepest emotions.

Whether it's Rothko's transcendent color fields born from personal emotional knowledge, or Kyong Lee's systematic emotional charts developed through conscious exploration, these works remind us that art's greatest power lies not in what it shows us, but in what it makes us feel. They prove that the most profound human experiences - love, loss, wonder, transcendence - can be painted not through images, but through the pure language of color, form, and feeling itself.

In the end, these painters of emotion have achieved something remarkable: they've made the invisible visible, the ineffable tangible. They've shown us that emotion isn't just something we bring to art, it can be art's very subject, its deepest purpose, and its most lasting gift to humanity.

By Francis Berthomier

Featured Image: "Sinneswelt - ELT57" (2025), Kyong Lee

Emotional Artworks on Ideelart