A New Proposal on Analysis of Artistic Creativity through Introspection

Abstract

The genesis of the creative process in Art is currently conceived as the intellectual selection by the artist of fragments of memory from her/his personal, cultural and emotional experience. Interpretation of the artistic object has been systematically developed from an external perspective of art history, literature, and fine arts or of medicine and psychology. Recent neurological findings on the molecular nature of memory have revolutioned the knowledge of the mental process of memorization, remembrance and creative synthesis. A movement of scientists defends the necessity of new tools to access mental processes, inherently subjective, such as artistic creativity. In the light of those evidences, we propose a new approach to the artwork starting from a first-person analysis, namely introspection, which offers an interpretation of the genesis of the artwork from his/her own memory. The scientific, philosophical and social background on the neuropsychological processes guiding the creative activity is reviewed. Our purpose is to integrate the previous approaches from a wide multidisciplinary perspective, and to pose a new reflection on how the autobiographical and intertextual data from the artist are modeled in a dynamic way in the complex net of mental interactions up to reach the creation of an artwork, which highlights an original new vision on the reading of art. This insight from first-person analysis might complement and enrich other analyses external to the artist.