Artists’ Long-term Process for Making Art

For creative experts such as artists, their goal is not just to acquire the skills or techniques of their particular fields. It is also important for them to continue to produce high-quality new and unique works using those skills and techniques. How they become able to do this is a question that needs to be explored. With regard to creating new ideas or concepts, some researchers have suggested that selecting the good ones after many random variants is a useful strategy (e. g., Cziko, 1995). However, using such an approach, we would not come to understand how artists create their unique styles through decades of long-term art-making activities. Studies on the creative process of professional artists (e. g., Getzels & Csikszentmihayi, 1976; Yokochi & Okada, 2005) have also focused on the artists’ process of making only a small number of products in a relatively short period. Thus these studies were also not able to reveal the long-term process of making art. Our study aims to describe changes in the creative process through many years of art-making experiences.