| This interdisciplinary dissertation explores the creative processes of an artist and the transcendent nature of artistic experience. The phenomenological and heuristic aspects of this dissertation look at elements of the creative processes presented from both within and without . From within, the specific production pieces that informed and created this dissertation are explored through a mythopoetic lens. This provides the reader with an inside glimpse of the movement that occurs within the artist's mind, body, and spirit as she gives voice to the images that present to her. From without, three fundamental approaches to understanding the artist and the creative processes are presented: mimesis, numinous and informed intuition. The dissertation explores how mythic, depth psychological, and theoretical viewpoints illuminate these processes.; It has been my experience as a life-long artist that artistic creativity involves living and working at the borderlines of the rational and mythopoetic. This transcendent place of edgeness requires the artist to partake in a dance of body, mind, and spirit as she gives voice to the creative urges that surge through her. In this dissertation I have illustrated my journey of art making with four series of paintings, the written sacred stories told to me by some of these painted images, and the resultant creation myths that I wrote. It is my hope that these examples will not only provide insight into my own creative process, but also into the nature and possibilities involved with creative processes in general. While embracing the unknown, the irrational, and the mythopoetic, creativity also underscores the dynamic potential of simultaneously holding the tensions of the rational and the mythopoetic, the real and the unreal, and fact and fiction. This in-formed holding is one of the essential lessons artists can teach us all: that embracing intuition and the dark ambiguities which are forever a part of life, while simultaneously keeping a toehold to rationality, leads to an experience of the creative dance of being in the world. |
