Positive emotions about artistic creation might emerge from the “pleasure and the pride of welding well”, as Barba maintains, emphasising craftsmanship over cogni-tive processes� Or they can derive from intangible elements, such as curiosity (the individual’s cognition) or heuristics (working methods and routines)� In either case the artist’s attitude is one of experimentation and openness, and the recurring feeling is love of the creative process (as also reported in Perry 2005, p� 27)�
According to Annette K� Olesen, artistic creativity is related to curiosity, openness to surprises and serendipitous findings, but also the intentional seek-ing of situations that can excite curiosity and surprise� To her, artistic creativity
is connected somehow with constantly moving, that is because I am a curious person, I think that this is in my DNA, so I like to be surprised� There are some people who do not like to be surprised, if they have a work task in front of them� They see it as disruptive
to be surprised or that one even does something different� I can also of course [be dis-turbed] if the surprise is merely destructive, if I experience it as destructive, but overall, most times I think that surprise is constructive because it challenges me and also it keeps the material alive� The first film I made, Small Accidents, [was based on a] project Fuchs and I developed together with the actors, on the assumption or from a decision that we did not actually know what the story should be about at all� [There was an] extreme openness to what is surprising, what is possible and toward the actors [who were] as much in the dark as us of course, [and openness to the actors’] take on some directions�
So in many ways you can say Small Accidents was an endless chain of surprises� But I also learned that it is not something you need to be afraid of, it can facilitate great creativity, since you force… you are forced into some directions where you just wouldn’t have imagined that you would go�
Olesen starts by addressing the individual character traits that, according to her, portray her personal feeling of openness towards artistic projects� These posi-tively perceived feelings of curiosity and surprise might turn to rather negative experiences, if felt as disruptive in the course of the artistic making� Olesen does not go on to specify where the difference lies, but later on her quote touches implicitly the element of meaningfulness� The project with her colleague seems to be informed by mutual trust and agreement with collaborating actors� The endless chain of surprises, even though it was forcing or obliging the process, is remembered positively as a creative experience�
Positive emotions, in this and other cases, originate from artistic knowledge - knowledge of genre or medium (The Mira Quartet), or general knowledge on being human (Kvium, “a part of what we call art is very wide, a description of human emotions that are very difficult to touch verbally”), or knowledge of each other, especially in the performing arts (The Mira Quartet)�
Going back to the matter of intentionality, what arises from our interviews –unsurprisingly– is that artists deliberately build conditions that are optimal to them in order to meet positively the experience of art-making or art apprecia-tion� Benjamin Koppel considers enjoyment of the process of music composition or performance as the necessary condition for art to emerge: “one must learn to love it while one does it� For instance, if you do not like to write a musical score, so you shouldn’t be a composer� If you only fix your gaze on the moment when it becomes great, when I stand with the finished work, and it is about to be played… if you only focus on that, then you do not [love the process], you should love it and also [love] to practice”� He maintains that one must learn to love the process, even in its routines (“also to practice”), so we infer that this enjoyment can be learned or taught� Similarly, Signe Klejs suggests that joy in art-making can be “found”� She lists the creative strategies that she uses and says:
“it’s probably very much humour […] it’s also about finding a desire and a joy in
it”� Probably suggesting the same intentional search for what is pleasurable in art-making is the following quote from Michael Kvium, where he, on the one hand makes the distinction between artistic activities that the individual is –almost naturally– drawn to and the ones that are pleasurable but do not meet the artist’s skills or main interest, such as music for him� On the other hand, he hypothesises a transfer of cognitive skills from drawing, which he is interested in and good at, to music training that needs the same kind of deep concentration and commit-ment to expericommit-ment�
I would be extremely bad at sitting down and learning musical notation and playing from musical notation, something that other people [can do]� I can listen to music, I am active but I also have a burning desire to sit down and try to find out what is the connec-tion in music? What happens if I press this and these keys down on a piano? And what happens if you do this and that? And you could say I have some advantages: that I love from the start the fact of being able to just sit down in peace and draw�
Kvium seems to imply a universal cognitive and psychological skill, persever-ance in concentration, which might be the emotional key to artistic creation in general� However, he also expresses doubts on the artists’ capability of relating seriously to the matter of emotions and art: “It may well be that there are some artists who are trying to reduce it, really maybe to get rid of all that emotional side, but actually now there’s none of us that knows where feelings are, they are most likely in the brain as everything else, but we’ll have to accept that we are not fully in control of ourselves or our process”� He goes on to say that artists should accept this not-knowing, well aware of the fact that the artist’s knowing is a matter of intuition (sensation) and the artist’s choices are not made according to general criteria of goodness or rightness, but on “what works” here and now for this specific work of art� With this pragmatic and partly heuristic view on artistic creation, he also claims the right to hold the issue of emotions open to artistic investigation, not in the sense of the expression of emotions, but rather in a more questioning and wondering attitude� He claims that no one, not even artists, knows anything about emotions, but the arts can investigate them with openness�
One interesting remark on positive emotions in artistic creation concerns what the artists say about their receivers� Valeur, for instance, finds the ultimate purpose for his work when it finally meets its receiver: “I have had the pleasure of writing for them there, so I know well the pleasure and it is big and good, but I feel nothing is done until it has met… has got hold of the reader”� This stage of the creative process is full of pleasure no matter how large the audience is: “an audience who really enjoys what I’m doing, so it can also be a small audience, it can just be anyone struck by my work”� What the artist perceives as enjoyable
here is the acknowledgment of the audience’s satisfaction� In a slightly differ-ent setting, Johannes Exner mdiffer-entions how exhilarating it can be to witness the arousal of interest in other people� Now in his eighties, the architect has often taught his craft to university students and found out that there are many topics that can interest people, but a very special moment is when “they discover what is insanely interesting� That was an incredible happiness� Then you can go any-time in the most adverse weather and find something that’s damn interesting”�
How interest is relevant to creativity will be unfolded later on, not before having cast a glance at a specific artistic emotion generated during flow experiences�