Exploring complexity-entropy, eye-tracking, experience, creativity, familiarity, and emotional responses to 40 paintings of Raja Ravi Varma – father of Indian modern art

This study used multi-faceted behavioural and quantitative experimental measures to explore observations of paintings of celebrated 19th-century Indian painter Raja Ravi Varma, widely accepted as the father of Indian modern art. The study tried to trace the different aspects of a subject’s emotional and perceptual involvement with his work of art using the emotion classification system in Indian aesthetics based on the Rasa theory. Rigorous analysis was performed to investigate seven hypotheses on art perception and emotion with 40 Ravi Varma paintings featuring 15 different subjects. We looked at various factors like the complexity and entropy of composition, perception based on eye-tracking, art-experience, creativity, familiarity, and emotional reactions. The human eye-tracking data was compared with heatmaps generated through image analysis software. The research provides crucial information about the complex nature of aesthetic experiences and highlights certain limitations of current empirical aesthetics in decoding the subjective experience of art.