Paul Bloodgood (1960-2018) was an award-winning painter, influential gallerist/curator and a passionate educator with a 30+ year career based in NYC. After graduating from Yale, Bloodgood quickly established himself as a practitioner of intelligent, gutsy, bright-colored abstract painting. Countering the prevailing performance-based and conceptual movements of the early 1990s, these early works also set the stage for his on-going, against-the-stream approach to art that would come to define his career.
In 2010, after a traumatic brain injury, his capacity for language diminished, heightening and enhancing his visual perception/optical system. That shift proved to be the first sign of early-onset Alzheimer's Disease. Although he became increasingly aphasic and required assistance for daily living, painting was the last independent thing he could do. His drive to paint was stronger than his drive to put food in his mouth. He painted until he became bed-bound in August 2017.
Artist, art educator, and founding director of the Paul Bloodgood Center for the Study of Neuroaesthetics, Kelly Adams has long been interested in how physical changes in the brain affect the mind and creativity. During the course of Bloodgood’s drawn-out illness, Adams recognized the urgency of translating the research findings of neuroaesthetics into practical applications with benefits to human creative development and health.
As a field, neuroaesthetics is the study of aesthetic experiences emergent from complex brain systems. It seeks to identify the neural mechanisms involved in the production and reception of aesthetic experiences. The impact of neuroaesthetic research is profound, with implications ranging from the artist’s health, the identification of the neural substrates of aesthetics, art education, and the art market.