How a Painter Paints: An Interdisciplinary Understanding of Embodied Creativity

Drawing from the seminal definition of the principles of abstract art posed by Wassily Kandinsky in the early years of the twentieth century, and contextualizing that knowledge in contemporary cognitive metaphor theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999), the study attempts to arrive at an understanding of how cognitive structure emerges in pragmatic self-observation during the artistic process. Through application of the concept of “enaction” (Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991), the research proposes a first-person approach to the exploration and derivation of the syntax of interactive creativity.