The stages of the creative process that I have identified through analysis are the "genesis" of an idea for a new work, the "development" of that idea as the artist interacts with her medium, and the "separation" of the finished work from the artist and presented to the public for the first time in an exhibition. In this perspective, I liken the connection between an artist and their creation to that of a mother or other caretaker and a kid. Many individuals feel a sense of loss or relief when a project they've been working on for a long time is finally finished, as if their "baby" has finally grown up and moved out. In this paper, I take this idea further to suggest that the psychoanalytic literature pertaining to the mother/child relationship, especially as put forward by psychoanalysts of the British Object Relations school, can shed light on artists’ processes and the states of mind they experience. I draw on the work of D.W. Winnicott, Marion Milner, Christopher Bollas and others to explore the extent to which the mother/child metaphor offers a new way of understanding artists’ experiences.

genesis, conception, gestation, development, relationship, artist, nascent artwork, separation, parlance, psychoanalytic