The Relation between Visual Associations of a Random Fixed Cardboard Piece and Introversion-Extroversion as well as the Level of Creativity in a Group of Visual Artists

The mental visual association of a vague and shapeless form may happen for anybody but only an artist can make an objective form out of it through drawing.  This article studies the relationship between the visual associations of a random cardboard piece as the pattern drawn by the artists and the type of their personality as well as the level of their creativity. The samples consist of 80 artists in different educational levels including BA, MA and PhD in the Art University of Isfahan and Isfahan Painters Association that were selected by convenience sampling. A white piece of cardboard with an identical random form was given to samples on which they were asked to draw their visual association. Then, they were asked to answer a questionnaire made by the researcher along with Eysenck personality test and Torrance creativity test. This research is a quantitative study using correlation method and its data was analyzed drawing on descriptive-statistical and deductive techniques as well as SPSS software. The results of this study show that there is a significant relation between the type of personality, creativity and visual association; that is, the samples with higher level of creativity had higher personal sensitivity and were more extrovert relative to lower-creativity samples. The results also show that among various themes acquired from visual association of the cardboard piece only the association of “the man in hat” has a significant relation with the form of the piece so that the samples with higher level of creativity drew different themes whereas samples with lower level of creativity tended more to draw “the man in hat” theme. Moreover, amongst the samples, extrovert persons outnumbered other groups. The most prominent difference between extroverts and introverts lies in the association and drawing of “the man in hat” theme in which extroverts outnumbered other groups. There is also a significant relationship between the feeling of motion and various visual associations which may be due to the state or form of the piece. Hence, it could be suggested that there is a significant relation between the type of personality (introversion or extroversion), creativity and visual association among visual artists.