Illuminating Artistic Processes toward Transdisciplinary Discourse

What can we learn about aesthetics by studying the creative process of art-making? Much research has focused on the viewer’s relationship with the art-object. Analyzing this experience provides a quantitative approach, but such an approach, as Chatterjee (2011) describes, runs the risk of “looking for the dropped coin under the lamp because that is where things are visible. . . ” In this paper, we shift from the work of art as a site of inquiry, and instead, investigate and demystify some of the processes, attitudes, and systems that lead up to the production of artwork. Through structured conversations, we discussed the creative work processes of five American artists: Kendall Babl, Iris Bernblum, Ryan Coffey, Danny Giles, and Kelly Lloyd. At the time we conducted the conversations all of these artists were based in Chicago, IL, USA, but their backgrounds, age, gender, ethnicity, and artistic production varied. The conversations followed four areas of inquiry: Seeing, Thinking, Context, and Beauty. Upon reviewing the conversation transcripts, we looked for commonalities, and created the following meta categories based on the artists responses: Artistic Processes, The Expanded Studio, Learning to See, and Emotional and Spiritual Comprehension of Art and the Human Experience. In the following sections, we outline how each of these categories were utilized by the individual artists. Similar types of conversation have been employed in the field of creativity research (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996; Mace, 1997; Mace and Ward, 2002; Rawlings and Nelson, 2007; Botella et al., 2013) to cite a few. Our work differs in a few important ways. This body of research, which has its roots in Graham Wallas’ four stages of the creative process (Wallas, 1926), details a scientific inquiry into the artist’s creative process as separate from research into aesthetics. We do not support the separation of creativity research from aesthetic research and believe that the combination of both fields can advance the study of creative practices within the aesthetic realm. Tinio (2013) similarly attempts to link the two fields through his mirror model which contends that the experience of art-viewing is mirrored and analysable in that of art-making: “Considering the aesthetic processing of an artwork in terms of the artistic processes that produced it allows for an account of the experience of art in its fullest manifestation...” Further, while summarizing his seminal and expansive research initiative, Csikszentmihalyi (1996, p. 14) laments “More than half of the natural scientists...agreed to participate. Artists, writers, and musicians, on the other hand, tended to ignore our letters or declined—less than a third of those approached accepted.” Our engagement with this subject is as cultural producers working from the inside. At the time we began our investigation, we relied on our intimate familiarity with artistic processes to first solicit and then guide the conversations. As Chatterjee (2014) states, “[Neuroaesthetics] is still working out its research agenda, methods of investigation, and even which questions are worth pursuing.” By documenting, and providing elemental analysis of these types of conversations, we hope to help shape future neuroaesthetic research and open new territory in the field of aesthetics, offering an interdisciplinary approach to the study of artistic process that includes collaborations between neuroscientists, artists, curators, and art-writers.