Making Sense of an Artwork: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis of Participants' Accounts of Viewing a Well-Known Painting

This work explores the meaning-making activities described by participants as they viewed a well-known painting. Research into aesthetic engagement has implicated an array of cognitive, affective, and perceptual processes. Types and aspects of artworks and of viewers have been investigated and a wide range of contextual factors have been identified as influential on viewer and viewed. The complexity of aesthetic experience is such that increasingly, a multidisciplinary approach toward its study has been encouraged. Despite this, experiential investigations into art-viewing are few. This study involves interviews with 12 participants, each conducted while viewing Las Meninas by Diego Velazquez. Using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, three Group Experiential Themes were derived. Of these, "Meaning-Making, Interpretative Content," is presented singly to allow for depth of discussion. This theme captures participants' interpretative activities during viewing, exploring how they made sense of what they saw. Considerations of temporality, historicity, and social context were particularly prominent.