Ideas or thoughts of creativity can come from many different sources : from one another , nature , simple things that surround us , chaos , architecture , politics , society , sounds , observations and a million other possibilities — and sometimes from unusual places such as what happened to me one afternoon at the mall while looking for a gift . My solo exhibition at San Diego International Airport was inspired by a window display at a clothing store featuring very large honeycomb structures , with hexagonal shapes of amber and gold . As an artist who works with the medium of
Sketches from notebook encaustic I naturally stopped in my tracks and began to sketch an interpretation of what I saw . I was eager to get home to begin the process of making these images come to life in my studio . The gift I went to find was never purchased . Instead I received the gift of a creative moment and the beginning of a life-changing process in my art career .
Hungarian Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has dedicated his career to the study of creative people . He argues that the creative process consists of five parts : preparation , incubation , revelation , evaluation and processing . " Preparation is the process where the artist cultivates ideas that roam below the levels of consciousness . The revelation is when these ideas come up to the levels of awareness and take shape . The assessment is to analyze whether in fact these ideas are worth being developed . And finally , the development ( process ) is to transform these ideas into reality ." It is interesting for me to notice how these relate to the artwork that we all do and is something that I would like to explore further .