The Process of Art‐making and Creative Expertise: An Analysis of Artists' Process Modification

Abstract

The present study investigates how emerging/young and established/expert artists create artwork, paying special attention to modifications in the art‐making process. Here, “process modification” is the means by which artists generate new artistic concepts by modifying elements of their previous artwork. To examine whether emerging artists use such modifications in the same manner as experts, we interviewed 28 contemporary artists (including 14 experts). The results reveal that most of the emerging artists modified their work unsystematically. Emerging artists drastically changed the subject/motif, method, and concept for their new artwork. Experts, in contrast, used Concept modification to generate new art ideas based on their creative vision and to produce more artwork series than before finding a creative vision. These results are discussed in relation to the development of creative expertise.

Exploring the Potential of Art Workshop: An Attempt to Foster People’s Creativity in an Online Environment

“…Most programs and studies have not paid sufficient attention to broad and comprehensive ways to facilitate creativity and support the concept and vision generation. This study proposed the importance of the creativity dynamics approach with the ultimate goal of generating concepts and visions from a long-term perspective based on the theory of creative expertise (e.g., Okada et al, 2009;Shimizu & Okada, 2018;Yokochi & Okada, 2020). This approach also referred to the systems model (Csikszentmihayli, 1988(Csikszentmihayli, , 2014 and the 5A approach (Glaveanu, 2013) that strongly proposed the importance of interaction among people and the environment.…”

“…For example, a study of novices' art creation showed that by incorporating others' perspectives by copying others' artwork, people can change their own perspective of creation and generate novel works (Okada & Ishibashi, 2017). As for the third component, studies on the development of creative expertise suggest that the long-term exploratory process plays a critical role in the creative expertise development (Okada, Yokochi, Ishibashi, & Ueda, 2009;Shimizu & Okada, 2018;Yokochi & Okada, 2020). We have previously mentioned the details of this component.…”

“…Further, through long-term engagement in these kinds of exploratory processes, the contemporary artists generated their artistic concepts and creative visions connected strongly to their values and lives. This is a kind of "Process Modification" in which these artists modify their usual art-making process to attempt something new (Okada, Yokochi, Ishibashi, & Ueda, 2009;Yokochi & Okada, 2020). Previous studies to facilitate the creativity have not sufficiently examined these concepts and creative visions.…”

Why create SciArt? An investigation into science artists' goals and professional journeys

“…For example, science communicators may use an internal goal or motivation [Moravcsik, 1974], such as personal enjoyment, creative self-expression, or finding beauty, to help them create work that others will enjoy [Brown Jarreau, 2015a]. Internal goals as well as personal interests, experiences, and intentions may be particularly important to the artist's creation process [Yokochi & Okada, 2021].…”

To map or not to map: Professional actors are capable of validly connecting extremely distant verbal analogues.

“…By studying the cognitive performance or processes of experts, psychologists have been able to ascertain basic inferences about the mind and brain (e.g., Dottori et al, 2020; Sella & Kadosh, 2018), as well as more applied findings that center around developmental, educational, or organizational phenomena (Alexander, 2003; Gobet, 2005). As part of this line of inquiry, psychologists have recruited a wide variety of experts in their research including chess masters (Bilalić et al, 2010), fighter pilots (Boyd et al, 2005), emergency room physicians (Redelmeier, 2005), and, increasingly in recent years, highly regarded professional creative artists (Yokochi & Okada, 2021).…”