The study included the process of creating a painting cycle by the artist with simultaneous photographic documentation of the phases of paintings creation, as well as emerging emotional states and experiences. The research problem was expressed in the question: ”What is an impact of the creative process on the level of artist’s well-being?”. Psychological tools in the form of questionnaires were used for registration. The study was exploratory in nature. It was based on an auto-ethnographic method.

The artist was interested in how painting, understood as a process, affects her personal psychophysical functioning as an artist and how the course of the creative process affects her. She also asked herself whether self-observation supports the creative process or is an obstacle. The vivisection was of particular importance due to the processual nature of the artist’s painting.

The study positively confirmed the hypothesis concerning the relationship between the artists’s well-being and a course of the creative process and the impact of working with the psyche on creativity. Ambiguous observations were made with regard to the relationship between the work’s content and the artist’s emotions. There were also different effects of self-observation on the effectiveness and course of the creative process. In the analyses, the author referred to psychological investigations and the results of empirical studies carried out by psychologists with visual artists abroad.
A detailed description of the research can be found in the artist’s dissertation An Artist For The World. The World For An Artist.

Photos below: Examples of documentation collected during self-observation. Own materials.