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Josh Gosfield's 'The Atlas of Emotions'

Atlas of Emotions, a zine by Josh Gosfield

Josh Gosfield, artist and illustrator, talks about his new zine, The Atlas of Emotions, which maps the inner world emotions.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. For our last few minutes today, what do pain, pleasure, sorrow, and freedom look like? Seriously, imagine the range of human emotions visually. What do you see? A new zine by the artist Josh Gosfield aims to map out the inner world of emotions in the aptly named The Atlas of Emotions, where he depicts 12 emotions, and he achieves these rich textures through his illustrations.

We're going to talk about Josh Gosfield's The Atlas of Emotions and some of the challenges of universalizing emotions visually that can be deeply personal and subjective. We're also going to open up the phones. Listeners, for any of you, I wonder, do you associate or experience any of your emotions with colors, shapes, textures, or anything else visual? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Serious question, I'll bet some of you do.

Do any of you associate or experience any of your emotions with colors, shapes, textures, or anything else visual? What would be in your atlas of emotions or portrait gallery of emotions or art museum of emotions? What do you look like, or what does it look like, I should say, when you're actually experiencing joy or anger or inspiration or boredom or any other feeling?

What might they look like when you think about them later? Have you ever done any art yourself along these lines? Do you associate or experience any of your emotions with anything visual? Color, shapes, textures, anything else? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692 as we welcome Josh Gosfield back to WNYC. Hi, Josh.

Josh Gosfield: Hi, Brian. Good morning. How are you?

Brian Lehrer: Good. The concept of an atlas typically involves mapping out physical landscapes. How did you adapt this idea to map out the emotional landscape in your zine?

Josh Gosfield: That's a great question. As you said, the purpose of an atlas is to map out the world and make it known, so I thought, "Why not do that for emotions?" It seemed like a really good way to package this particular zine because even though emotions aren't an outer landscape, they are in a sense an inner landscape. Some of them tower over us like mountains or swell up inside us like rivers or erupt like volcanoes.

I thought it'd be really cool to depict emotions, love and pleasure, and pain, wanderlust, and curiosity in a way that actually would help people see, feel, and understand them as it is in an atlas. Hopefully, as they're flipping through the zine, maybe even marinate in a sense of what that emotion means to them for a little bit.

Brian Lehrer: I'm going to go through a few of these as well as we can on the radio about something visual. Do you depict loneliness as sitting in a cave looking at a smartphone? Why that?

Josh Gosfield: What could be lonelier than being all alone in a dark room bent over a cell phone, especially when the only light in the room is the cell phone and it illuminates your lonely face? I think probably almost every listener out there has experienced this at one time or another and maybe at many times.

Brian Lehrer: For inspiration, the feeling of inspiration, your image is of a person in a bathtub with their hair going wild, I love this image, the word "ideas" in multiple colors literally popping out of their hair and their eyes wide open and a big smile on their face. I'm curious about the setting. Do you tend to get inspiration in the bathtub?

Josh Gosfield: I get inspiration anywhere and everywhere I can. Obviously, being an artist, inspiration is the tool of my trade. With some of the emotions, I went to maybe what was a little bit obvious. It's that eureka moment in the bathtub. I think it's a classic.

Brian Lehrer: A classic visually depicted now by you. A listener writes, "I love this question about visualizing emotions. I often ask my 6-year-old, 'If today was a color, what color would it be?' and he often gives me a rundown. Blue is sad, yellow is happy, and then gives me a color." I think they actually teach now to kids a color wheel of emotion. Were you aware of that?

Josh Gosfield: No, I don't. Being an artist, it makes total sense. I even have a file that I go to that has every single color combination known to man. Often, before I do an illustration, I look through there and each one has a particular feeling to it. It's not just the single color, but yellow and red has a particular feel, and blue and green have a particular feel.

Brian Lehrer: Another one from the book, you bundle wrongdoing, shame, atonement, and forgiveness onto one page depicted by four of those little troll dolls, I guess you call them, that people have. That was before trolls were evil-doers on the internet. These four troll dolls appear in sequence. It looks to me like first wrongdoing, then it experiences shame, then atonement, and then they are forgiven somehow and feel forgiveness. Why those little troll dolls to represent that cycle?

Josh Gosfield: I think, again, I let the emotions tell me how they want to be depicted, and the idea of forgiveness it really is a cycle, Brian. You're not going to get forgiven if you haven't done something wrong. You're not going to get forgiven if you don't feel that sense of shame. You're not going to be forgiven if you don't somehow atone for it. Then you get that feeling of forgiveness.

I guess I love the idea of the troll dolls because they're so iconic and almost comical, and it almost plays off in a contrast with the seriousness of the cycle of forgiveness. On the facing page, I have the phrase "I'm sorry" because if you don't say, "I'm sorry," you're never getting that forgiveness.

Brian Lehrer: Danielle in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Danielle.

Danielle: Hi, Brian. Good morning. I wanted to just tell you that years ago, I was brutally attacked and I was in grad school and then my mom died. I didn't know what to do with myself. I went back to grad school, and I was researching illuminated manuscripts and their symbols.

I ended up using a lot of symbols from then and other different cultures and combining them into a thesis, breaking down an entire year into 12 pieces using flowers, insects, sometimes body parts like brains and hearts and ears to talk about my trauma without really talking it about and just making images that were beautiful to look at but also really deeply symbolic of my journey through [crosstalk].

Brian Lehrer: Did it get particular so that an insect represented a certain feeling or experience?

Danielle: Absolutely, yes. Yes. Flies are symbolic of evil. Ants are symbolic of industry. Bees are symbolic of honeyed words and creativity. They were all woven in with different flowers. Columbines are symbolic of sorrow, daisies are symbolic of innocence, et cetera. Each thing as you look through, and they're small, they're like little mandala images,

as you walk through each painting, each thing means something, and it's in the format of an illuminated manuscript with a central image, gold leaf, and in a mandala format.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, each thing. Danielle, I'm going to leave it there. Thank you so much. William in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, William.

William: Hello, Brian Lehrer. I'm going to just comment on piggybacking on what the lady previously said. As a standup comedian, it's vibrations and energy. If someone gets angry, they get red, no matter whether they're Black, white, whatever they are. As far as colors are concerned, the colors, if it's a gloomy day, it's going to rain, you're going to feel down. When it's sunny, people want to talk to you. It's basic common sense.

If I get on stage and I feel nervous, I'm going to feel a red energy. Oh God, [unintelligible 00:08:51]. If I feel good, I can make people laugh, and [unintelligible 00:08:56] could I put on a happy face then people will say, "Hello, can I help you?"

Brian Lehrer: William, thank you. Thank you very much. Josh, it's true there are some classics along these lines, right? If you're feeling down, you're feeling blue. If you're angry, as William says, you're red with anger.

Josh Gosfield: Yes, absolutely. I love these two callers. It's part of the beauty of art, whether it's visual art or comedy. All great art is going to somehow tap into emotions and both people's personal experience of emotions, but at the same time, you have the universal experience, which the comic gentleman was talking about. Of course, anger is red. Of course, sadness is blue, rain is gloomy, the sun is happy. We have all those universals, but the job of the artist is to make something unique that also resonates with the universal quality of that particular emotion.

Brian Lehrer: Listener writes, "There's a great Golden Girls scene on this topic. Dorothy says, 'I was feeling jealous and lonely and God knows what else.' Blanche says, 'Magenta. That's what I call it when I get that way. All kinds of feelings tumbling all over themselves. Well, you know you're not quite blue because you're not really sad. Although you're a little jealous, you wouldn't say you're green with envy. Every now and then you realize you're kind of scared, but you'd hardly call yourself yellow. I hate that feeling. I just hate it and I hate the color magenta.'"

Somebody gave us a little transcription from the Golden Girls. Pretty awesome, right?

Josh Gosfield: That's incredible.

Brian Lehrer: Last question for you. Do you find as an artist that creating images helps you to deal with your own emotions?

Josh Gosfield: This was funny. One aspect of this was a little bit just a self-improvement project because I'm always trying to get better at my art and I felt like I would like to learn how to infuse emotion in my art that would translate to the person. There was a bit of just a selfish self-improvement part to this for me.

Brian Lehrer: Josh Gosfield's new zine is called The Atlas of Emotions. How do people get it? Real quick.

Josh Gosfield: Just check me out on Instagram and DM me, and we'll get you set up with your very own copy of this custom-made 28-page zine.

Brian Lehrer: Thanks, Josh.

Josh Gosfield: Thank you, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: That's The Brian Lehrer Show for today, produced by Mary Croke, Lisa Allison, Amina Srna, Carl Boisrond, and Esperanza Rosenbaum. Zach Gottehrer-Cohen edits our national Politics Podcast. Juliana Fonda at the audio control. Stay tuned for All Of It.

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