Picturing Melancholy: Expressionism’s Paralanguage

Talk by Dr. Robert Belton, Art Historian & Professor, UBC
McMaster Museum of Art
Thursday, November 10, 6 – 7 pm

Paralanguage refers to non-verbal communications that convey emotion and affect the meaning of what is being said. Elements include body language, facial expressions and vocal qualities such as pitch, volume, and intonation.

Dr. Belton will speak about devices that visual artists use similarly, to capture feelings, emotions, and meanings that are simply too difficult to depict directly.

“The reason that some art is expressionistic (think: distorted) is not due to technical inability,” he writes. “It’s a choice driven by a need to express something greater—something usually related to personal context—than the sum of the parts. This is paralanguage.”

Dr. Belton’s talk will look at artists represented in our current exhibition Living Building Thinking: Art and Expressionism. The forthcoming exhibition publication will include his essay “Expressionism’s Paralanguage”.

Dr. Robert J. Belton is an Art Historian and Professor at University of British Columbia. He served for five years as the first Dean of the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at the Okanagan Campus. Dr. Belton also taught courses in art history and theory at Queen’s University, the University of Western Ontario, and McMaster University, where he received both the Alma Mater Society Frank Knox Award for Teaching Excellence and the Arts and Science Undergraduate Society Award for Teaching Excellence in the same year.

This event is Free and Open to the General Public.