Common to creativity studies is a particular attention to the motivational side of any creative endeavour (Hennessey 2010)� Creative individuals and groups tend to hold on to a problem through all sorts of challenges and in spite of all sorts of adversities� Artists, specifically, have proven throughout history their ability to master the skills of persistence� As Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi (2003) discuss in their empirical study on creative individuals –including artists– who have had long-term engagement with creative tasks, persistence is one of the key characteristics of creativity in later life� Probably due to the arts’ inherent heuristic function, professional artists are called to be or become exceptionally resistant to constraints� In order to navigate through uncertainty, artists need to have or develop perseverance and determination� A further hypothesis might be that the social role of the arts in challenging the establishment is the reason why artists are recurrently left at the margins of society� Values of cultural renewal or ideological provocation are implicit within the arts as one of their functions, together with aesthetic uplifting, appreciation of beauty, divertissement, ideo-logical statement, transmission of knowledge or values, cognitive effort and so forth� Art genres can hold this function to a higher or lesser degree, depending on the socio-cultural context and historical period� For instance classical ballet is not, in our contemporary Western society, means of radical renewal in society�
However, both incremental and radical changes continuously occur within the genre and practice of ballet� Conservative or totalitarian societies generally re-act strongly against this role or function of the arts, with the consequence that in these socio-cultural conditions artists acquire a marginal role� Struggling for their own existence and right to exist has always been the artists’ life-condition, together with the creative task of struggling with a medium or material� As Julia Varley says: “you have to be patient and work hard, and that is not something which is obvious, because a lot of people think that acting is just, yes, being in-spired by something”�
Creating something new with value is often an undertaking that comes with the ability of persuading others of the appropriateness of the creative solution (Runco 2010, Simonton 1995)� Standing up to societal pressure to persuasion and the open heuristic method makes artistic creativity a hard nut to crack, and artists exceptionally disposed to persist against adversities� Hustvedt mentions almost matter-of-factly the acceptance of hardship as a part of the artist’s iden-tity: “[…] Hardship can be good� None of us can avoid it, after all� Resilience can come out of hardship, and that resilience also plays a role in becoming an artist”�
With Weisberg (1993) we believe that the artists’ resilience in creative tasks is nothing but an ordinary process, common to and shared by all individuals� How-ever, unlike Weisberg, we wish to propose that artists are trained to continually learn and employ these dispositions and these skills in order to create artistically�
Perseverance, in the artists’ case, is a matter of endless training and preparation for hardship, being justified by the very nature of artistic work: the dialogue (or for some, the fight) with a resistant matter, medium and conveyance of meaning through those means, together with the task of constant persuasion� But what motivates artists in their solid determination? What are the elements of this ar-tistic resilience?
The topic of motivation is vast and complex, especially in its association to creativity and our intention is not to be exhaustive concerning this subject� It is relevant to mention, though, the motivational side of positively felt experi-ences in the arts in relationship with the artists’ narratives� Much is still to be explored regarding the motivational side of artistic creativity� Fundamental con-tributions are from Amabile (1996) Deci (1975) Deci and Ryan (1985) and indi-rectly Csikszentmihalyi (2000, 1996)� It is still much debated whether intrinsic (inherently interesting tasks) or extrinsic (task engagement in order to achieve external goals) motivation drives creative individuals and creative processes� The latest findings in this field, mostly collected by means of controlled psychologi-cal experiments, identify the close interrelation between intrinsic and extrinsic motivational drives and emphasise the prominence of contextual conditions� In
her first account on motivation and creativity Amabile (1983) advocated the in-trinsic argument: “Inin-trinsic motivation is conducive to creativity, but exin-trinsic motivation is detrimental� It appears that when people are primarily motivated to do some creative activity by their own interest in and enjoyment of that activ-ity, they may be more creative than they are when primarily motivated by some goal imposed on them by others” (p� 15)� Subsequently, she revised this sharp dualism in the light of new evidence (1996a) and proposed a more contextual and relational approach� Her most recent work, like the work of Deci and Ryan (1985), seems to suggest that, regardless whether a task or activity is intrinsically or extrinsically motivated, creative outputs can be achieved� What seem to make a difference to motivation are traits related to the individual subjects, the nature of the task at hand and the environment in which individuals interact�
The nature of task (Amabile 1996a, p� 133) in our case is specifically ar-tistic� The interviewed artists were sampled among professionals with often lengthy experience in their given art form� The nature of their everyday ac-tivities is artistic� This means that they dedicate themselves to the making of art, activity at the same time challenging and rewarding� The interviewed art-ists describe these tasks as enjoyable in themselves, which is consistent with motivation theories that indicate enjoyable activities as being the most moti-vating (Amabile 1996a, p� 149)� Pleasantness of the artistic task is defined in Csikszentmihalyi and Robinson as autotelic, as it has an end in itself (1990)�
Rather, we propose that artists, even though their art-making has a specific goal (exhibition, performance, recording, publishing), suspend their attention to this goal or output, in order to fully concentrate on art-making as if it were autotelic� Even in artistic experimentations or improvisational performances the task holds a specific goal, such as finding new ways or solutions, but the goal disappears in the joy of the making� For instance in jazz improvisation the goal is a musical communication by means of a fine balance between solos and orchestra pieces, but as Anders and Benjamin Koppel recurrently say in their interview, what they feel is the fun of it� They maintain that musicians can-not keep on being musicians if they do can-not perceive their tasks as pleasurable�
Emotionally, the nature of the artistic task seems to be characterised by pas-sion and its dysfunctional twin, obsespas-sion� In our artists, though, these emotions, rather than jeopardising the creative effort, canalise the individual’s attention and creative skills by means of the interplay of emotions and rationality� Dif-ferently from the stereotype of the artist as slave of his or her passions, or the stage-divided understanding of creative processes, where creativity and intui-tion (divergent thinking) are separated from raintui-tional or critical decisions (con-vergent thinking), we suggest that both intuition and rationality work together,
often simultaneously in artistic processes� As Ramsland says of his writing pro-cess, very little is left to inaccuracy and neglect - complexity is embraced and thoughtfully framed in creative routines and working processes, improvisation is unleashed and looked at critically, chaos is doled out in the right proportions and at the right time� The writer’s openness to the new, his flow experience, even his giving away of control are carefully structured in productive routines, where both unconscious elements (as he describes them) and skills from the writer’s craft manufacture an artistic product� According to motivation theories, being so focused on his task, the writer might find motivating any experience that is salient to his task� Meaningfulness of the task at hand, or as Deci (1975) defines it, the “salience” of the task is what might motivate or enhance motivation in in-dividuals� Similarly instrumental might be the appropriateness of experiences to the task at hand: for instance Deci (1975) mentions the fact that feedback giving information on one’s competence has positive effects on creativity and perfor-mance, which is consistent with Amabile 1996a�
Even though we did not solicit answers on motivation or motivational drives, in our interviews, the theme of drive or struggle to create kept on popping up�
Moreover, flow experiences, which are generated by deep motivation and spawn even more task engagement, are recurrent and often mentioned when artists de-scribe their creative processes� One more trait that is related to motivation and its subjective perception is resilience� As Julia Varley says, creativity to her is the
“ability of turning a weakness into a strength”, which she has done both as a child in school and in her profession as an actress with her voice� English-born Varley attended in 5th grade an Italian school with all the challenges that this brings to a child of foreign mother tongue� Being unable to formulate long sentences, she once delivered an essay made of short sentences, which was met by the teacher’s praise to her surprise: “[it] was strange because what we tried to learn was to make long complicated sentences, but I liked the short ones, and so I decided I was going to do an essay with very short sentences, and then the teacher con-gratulated me and said it was very well written� So probably this also marked me in a way of writing afterwards”� The actress consistently adopted this attitude of turning weaknesses into strengths in her career, for example when she decided to develop her voice differently from that of the other Odin Teatret actresses�
Rather than striving to educate her voice as strong and powerful, like colleagues Else Marie Laukvik, Iben Nagel Rasmussen and Roberta Carreri, Varley decided, after many frustrating attempts to violate her vocal nature, to turn her soft, light voice into her own characteristic sound (Varley 2011)� In her adult career, as in her schooldays, Varley responds to adversities by looking at them not as con-straints but as possibilities� She does that by getting along with the life conditions
she meets and by keeping on trying, thus engaging in an undefeated dialogue with herself and with the process:
Each creative process is different so you can never rely on what you did the time before�
The only thing you can rely on is that you trust that at some point it will start working�
So in all of your desperation and tears and aargh… inside you, you know that at some point it will come out� But it’s like you can never know how to make a creative process, you know that you can do it, but every time you have to learn how to do it all over again�
The continuous process of learning is in this description overflowing with feel-ings: feelings of frustration, of being overwhelmed, but also feelings of trust and hope� Implicit we discern the actress’ skills and experience reassuring her about the perceived chaos of the creative process� Varley knows that each creative pro-cess is unique and she knows, because she has experienced it, that by keeping on trying at a certain point solutions will pop up� Moreover, she knows that crea-tive processes are diverse and imply a methodological openness on how to do them or how to learn them� She knows all that even when she feels discouraged�
Trusting the creative process might be one of the basic elements of the artist’s resilience� Resilience is defined differently, but here we intend it broadly as “the ability to bounce back or overcome adversity” (McCubbin 2001, p� 3)�
Another reference to this positive dynamic is to be found in Kvium:
So creativity is hugely driven by curiosity, it must be� Curiosity and doubt, because doubt is there too� What one has just made: why? When it just went so well, why can’t I do it anymore? Why do I not like it? […] It could also just be your bad mood that pre-vents you from receiving� It may be that the image has taken the upper hand, you cannot keep up, then you must spend more time on it to benchmark yourself again� It could also be that your brain has taken the upper hand and has interpreted what the image would like, so it actually has closed itself� Then it becomes of no interest to me, and most likely also unattractive to others� So it must contain something and then there may be many little things that maybe other people do not pay close attention to, but for me it is very important that [the work of art] comes through on the process� And the artwork had better stay in the workshop until I see it both on a very bad day and a very good day�
Rooted in the quest for knowledge, the process of artistic creativity meets the emotional and cognitive challenges of doubt, uncertainty and insecurity� What creative artists do in order to focus on their process is, according to Kvium, to build the conditions for preserving a clear mind and sharp artistic judgment despite external negative conditioning� This might imply that one of the art-ists’ strategies for creativity is their conscious acquisition of resilient psycho-emotional (e�g� trust in the process), cognitive (e�g� learning how to do it) and methodological (e�g� applying critical skills) strategies� No artist seems to suggest that these strategies are biological or innate� One interesting hypothesis in this
direction is Barba’s observation on the gender differences of resilient behaviour in his group:
Sometimes I found interesting only five minutes and I use it with what I have already done before� Maybe it was not interesting, and I say, no, it doesn’t function� Then we try again and again� It is curious that the Odin the people who have been more able to endure this way of working –or challenging one’s persistence– is mostly women� This fact has made me ask myself: why men, after a certain period are satisfied with that they do? Why they have a tendency to discuss or simply accept the working routine, while actresses continue to use their energies to find alternative ways to let their need be inte-grated in the collective process?
At the Odin Teatret, a group that in 2014 is celebrating its 50th jubilee, endur-ance has always been explicitly valued and practiced (Nagel Rasmussen 2006, Barba 2010)� Here Barba suggests that gender differences might explain his ac-tors’ and actresses’ perseverance� Even acknowledging the lack of specific studies on the relationship between resilience and creativity in the arts, still we believe that Barba’s gender distinction does not necessarily imply a biological justifica-tion� Rather, in his quote we read the collective sharing of the same healthy dis-satisfaction, “we try again and again”, in order to produce artistically satisfactory outputs� The drive that Barba recognises is interest� Others point to curiosity (Hustvedt, Kvium) as a trigger of motivation, others again mention extrinsically motivating rewards for hard work, such as good food, treats, hedonistic pleas-ures (Klejs and Rønsholdt) and underline that individuals can throw themselves into hard work only for short periods� All the drives that are mentioned in the interviews are consistent with more general findings on creative individuals and processes� For instance, Collins and Amabile (1999) summarise what creativ-ity theories indicate as motivational to creative activities: passion, love, tenaccreativ-ity, absorption, persistence� Regarding motivational drives we too are able to present narratives consistent with previous studies� Anecdotal and empirical studies, in this case, identify psychological needs like self-actualisation, autotelic enjoy-ment, self-understanding, emotional and cognitive regulation (control over one’s task) as inputs to motivation, which are what the artists interviewed in the pre-sent study indicate as triggering creative composition�
One last point about artists’ resilience when involved in creative tasks can be taken indirectly from psychoanalyst Peter Wolson (1995)� In his psychoanalyti-cal practice, he treated several patients with artistic backgrounds and formulated an interesting theory regarding the psycho-emotional traits of artistic creativity�
He calls it adaptive grandiosity, which is:
the artist’s exhilarating conviction of potential for greatness, the extremely high value that is placed on the uniqueness of feelings, perceptions, sensations, memories,
thoughts, and experiences, and on the importance of publicly exhibiting the content of the inner world through the creative medium� This type of grandiosity involves the art-ist’s total confidence and powerful belief in personal capacity to perform creative work�
It includes the conviction that the work will be an extremely valuable contribution to humanity, deserving of public adulation and possible self-immortality� It is an ego state that can be conscious or unconscious� This clearly differs from normal healthy self-con-fidence in which an individual believes in the value of perceptions and in the capacity for successful achievement, but lacks the pervasive grandiose qualities described above�
Adaptive grandiosity provides the motivational fuel to confront the blank canvas, which psychologically represents the void or nonbeing (pp� 577-578)�
With a clear psychodynamic background, this theory hints at Freud’s interpreta-tion of creative expressions as sublimainterpreta-tion of excess psychological energy into socially acceptable activities (Collins & Amabile 1999, p� 297)� We suggest that artists may engage in adaptive grandiose states of mind in order to instrumen-tally achieve artistic goals� As the adaptive dimension suggests, Wolson himself conceives adaptive grandiosity as an adjustment to the requirements of the ar-tistic profession� We wish to emphasise the intentionality that may occur in the process, where artists purposely switch on and off the trigger to and from adap-tive grandiosity, because this might help them meet the high demands implicit in the process of artistic composition: the encounter with medium and material, negotiations with peers and colleagues, and persuasion of a field�