Implicit Theories of Spanish Painters

Abstract

This work used as a starting point a previous historiographic study that identified 6 implicit theories on artistic creativity, and a second study that led to the formulation, in propositional terms, of the statements configuring its content as knowledge schemas. What we present here is the process of construction of a questionnaire to evaluate painters' identification with the different implicit theories on artistic creativity. Taking the most typical statements from each theory, we eliminated items through statistical analysis and carried out exploratory studies on the factorial structure of those remaining. This process resulted in the design of a questionnaire with 5 factors: impulsiveness, experimentation, search for oneself, communication, and psychological disorder. These dimensions, obtained on the basis of the analyses carried out with samples of painters, show substantial differences with respect to the theories previously defined in the general population, which suggests that there is less than total correspondence between implicit conceptions about the creativity of the artist and the general public. The last analyses carried out after application of this test have shown that ascription to a particular pictorial style does not condition the adoption of one implicit theory or another.