Visual Creativity

Abstract

Abstract When I teach the psychology of creativity at my university, painting is always the first example that comes up in class discussion—and it comes up more than music, theater, advertising, architecture, videogame design, Web site design, movie directing, or any of the many other creative domains of modern society. Painting dominates our discussions not because it’s the most common or the most influential art form of today; my students are surrounded by music, movies, videogames, and Web sites, and they only occasionally go to art museums. The reason that painting always comes up is that it seems to fit better into our culture’s individualist myths about creativity. More than any other creative domain, we imagine the painter working in isolation, without influence from the external environment and without concern for convention. It turns out that these stereotypes about painters are wrong. In this chapter I’ll show that explaining painting requires both individualist approaches and contextualist approaches. And of course fine art painting is only one of the many visual arts, so I’ll move beyond fine art painting and discuss installation art, comics, videos, and movies. With these genres of visual creativity, our creativity myths begin to fail in very dramatic ways.