Artistic creativity across the adult life span: An alternative approach

Conclusion The foregoing discussion attempts to present a preliminary exploration of the relationship between selected aspects of creative activity and life span developmental processes. It proposes some degree of synchronism between the maturational needs of the creative individual and both the forms of expression available to the artist through his/her selected artistic idiom and the predominant art ideology (or ideologies) of his/her cultural milieu. I believe this synchronism is necessary for the maintenance of creative effectiveness during certain definable life transitions, such as the approach to midlife, to which I refer in some detail in the discussion of Wordsworth's Immortality Ode and, more briefly, in the case of other distinguished Romantic and Victorian authors.As this has been an initial exploration, the developmental linkages proposed are, by nature, quite broadly conceived. It will take substantial effort to elaborate these claims, but the effort should be weighed against the opportunity of eventually being able to formulate a coherent, albeit tentative, theoretical model of artistic creativity in the life cycle. For this to be made plausible, other life stages and transitions should be approached in the same comparative manner, investigating the developmental significance of certain established thematic and structural recurrences in the works of, for example, elderly artists. While practically every art historian or biographer mentions the artist's later works in relation to earlier ones, a direct, systematic exploration of the subject has rarely been attempted. The tendency for art critics to overemphasize the formal analysis of isolated works of art and the reluctance of experimental psychologists to develop qualitative methods of creativity assessment have combined so far to arrest the evolution of appropriate paradigms for life span creativity research. It is my hope that this paper will make a modest contribution to changing this situation.