Abstract

Construction of a perception-used conceptual frame aimed at discriminating painting styles an analysis of relationship between painting style and aesthetic impression, and an experiment to test the effect of painting styles on aesthetic impression were carried out to develop a description system of painting styles. For the construction of the perception-based conceptual frame for painting styles, 16 perceptual attributes related to color, form and pictorial organization were proposed as major determinants of painting styles. For the analysis of relation between painting styles and aesthetic impressin, 27 Korean modern paintings were presented to art college students and rated with respect to painting styles along the dimensions of 16 perceptul attributes and aesthetic imperssions. In the task of rating aesthetic impression, a set of scales consisting of 51 adjectives which are frequently used to express aesthetic impression or critiques in painting were used. A principal-component analysis was applied to responses obtained with the 51 adjective scales to find that the four major factors, 'accent', 'freshness', 'graveness', and 'elaborateness' respectively explains 19%, 14%, 8%, and 6%, summing up to 47% of the aesthetic variance. Results of the multiple regression for each of the four aesthetic factors with 16 style attributes showed that the style attributes explained 54%, 26%, 26%, and 32% of the variance in 'accent', freshness', 'graveness', and 'elaborateness', respectivly. In the experiment to test the effect of the painting styles on aesthetic impression, an artist was instructed to draw paintings based on a set of specific aesthetic impressions specified by the result of multiple regression and the art college students rated impressions of the paintings along the dimensions of the four aesthetic factors. The style features instructed to the grist were those that ranked high correlation with the four aesthetic impression factors. The members of paintings drawn by the artist and rated by the students were 8 consistings of two genres(still-life and landscape) and four lists of style features corresponding to the four aesthetic factors. Result of the analysis on art college students responses showed that a specific combination of style features could evoke a specific aesthetic impression found by the multiple regression analysis.