Dissertation committee:
Φιλία Ίσαρη, Καθηγήτρια, Τμήμα Ψυχολογίας, Εθνικό και Καποδιστριακό Πανεπιστήμιο Αθηνών.
Μανόλης Δαφέρμος, Καθηγητής, Τμήμα Ψυχολογίας, Πανεπιστήμιο Κρήτης
Λίσσυ Κανελλοπούλου, Καθηγήτρια, Τμήμα Ψυχολογίας, Εθνικό και Καποδιστριακό Πανεπιστήμιο Αθηνών
Αικατερίνη Γκαρή, Καθηγήτρια, Τμήμα Ψυχολογίας, Εθνικό και Καποδιστριακό Πανεπιστήμιο Αθηνών
Μάριος Πουρκός, Καθηγητής, Τμήμα Προσχολικής Εκπαίδευσης, Πανεπιστήμιο Κρήτης
Αχιλλέας Χαλδαιάκης, Καθηγητής, Τμήμα Μουσικών Σπουδών, Εθνικό και Καποδιστριακό Πανεπιστήμιο Αθηνών
Βασιλική Χρυσανθοπούλου, Αναπληρώτρια Καθηγήτρια, Τμήμα Φιλολογίας, Εθνικό και Καποδιστριακό Πανεπιστήμιο Αθηνών
Summary:
The issue of creativity has been at the forefront of psychological research since the mid-twentieth century. This study continues this line of research, focusing specifically on artistic creativity, and seeks to elucidate the subjective meaning that creativity holds for the artist. More specifically, it aims to capture and describe how artists themselves construct, understand, and interpret their creativity in terms of its origins, the influences they have received, the socio-cultural elements that fuel and affect it, as well as the role of the body in the creative act. The research questions were explored through the lens of the narrative paradigm, which allows for the emergence of subjective understandings and meanings as they are formed within specific socio-cultural and temporal contexts. The narrative perspective, in particular, captures the psychological, social, cultural, temporal, and embodied aspects that participate in the construction of the stories people tell, through which they understand and give meaning to phenomena, the world, and themselves.
A total of 18 artists participated in the research, representing a wide range of creative fields, including painting, visual arts, cinema, literature, poetry, traditional music, sculpture, and puppetry. To generate the data, narrative interviews were conducted, and archival material from the life of Vincent van Gogh was utilized. The entirety of the data was analyzed using the method of narrative thematic analysis.
The research findings highlight the evolutionary and developmental nature of artistic creativity, as it emerges from continuous practice and engagement with the art world throughout the participants' lives. Moving along the timeline, the participants construct narratives that start from their childhood and gradually lead to the present of their artistic journey, highlighting pivotal events and individuals that played a role in it. In this sense, it is evident that there is a creative habitus (Bourdieu, 1984), which was formed through many years of engagement, practice, thinking, observation, relationships with other artists, study, habits, experimentation, questioning, etc.
Additionally, artistic creativity is constituted as a process with a dialectical, social nature. This involves a series of factors: firstly, the participants construct the significance of the internal dialogue with their personal experiences, thoughts, and emotions, as well as an external dialogue with socio-political reality. Regarding this interaction with the socio-cultural and political environment, our creators engage with it in various ways: whether through stimuli received from their social surroundings, the emotions triggered by a specific socio-political condition, or the internalization of stereotypes and beliefs that influence their creative actions in various ways. Within this interaction with the social milieu, there are also numerous difficulties that men and women encounter throughout their lives concerning their social and gender roles in relation to their artistic activity. Finally, the result of artistic creativity, the work itself, also has a dialectical nature, as it encapsulates all the aforementioned relationships, essentially representing a tangible point of convergence between the creator and the external environment.
The embodied nature of the creative process and act is another finding derived from this research, directly linked to the dialectical nature of creativity. The body emerges in this study as the source, medium, and site of the creative process, as the biological, sensorimotor, and psychological substrate upon which all actions involved in creating a work are based. Simultaneously, the body appears as part of a relationship formed with the work or the creative process, thus referring to Merleau-Ponty's concept of "intercorporeality" (1945).
Directly connected with the embodied dimension and the dialectical nature of the creative act is the role of the (physical or metaphorical) space within which the participants create. Both the physical space and materiality, as well as the metaphorical space of relationships with other people and symbolic systems (words, notes), represent affordances offered by the environment, or a kind of living archive where objects and materials are collected and preserved, providing possibilities for the future or raw materials for the present.
Overall, the research findings highlight three levels in the artistic process and creativity: the psycho-emotional, the embodied, and the socio-cultural, which constantly interact with each other along the axis of time, which also highlights the developmental nature of creative action. The temporal/developmental axis, the dialectical nature, the embodied dimension, and the contextualized character affirm that creativity is a dynamic, emergent, and distributed act, that the creative outcome is not merely a product, that the creator is not merely an individual but an agent of action, and that the physical/material dimension, in the form of space and the embodied aspect, actively participates in artistic creativity.
