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The present study investigates how emerging/young and established/expert artists create artwork, paying special attention to modifications in the art-making process. Here, "process modification" is the means by which artists generate new artistic concepts by modifying elements of their previous artwork. To examine whether emerging artists use such modifications in the same manner as experts, we interviewed 28 contemporary artists (including 14 experts). The results reveal that most of the emerging artists modified their work unsystematically. Emerging artists drastically changed the subject/motif, method, and concept for their new artwork. Experts, in contrast, used Concept modification to generate new art ideas based on their creative vision and to produce more artwork series than before finding a creative vision. These results are discussed in relation to the development of creative expertise.

The present study investigated how younger and expert artistscreate artwork, paying special attention to the modification ofconditions in the art-making process. Here, “processmodification” is the means by which artists generate newartistic ideas/concepts by modifying elements of one’s ownprevious artwork. To examine whether younger artists usesuch modifications in the same manner as experts, weinterviewed 28 contemporary artists (including 14 experts).Results revealed that most of the younger artists modifiedtheir work unsystematically. Younger artists drasticallychanged the subject/motif, method, and concept for their newartwork. Experts, in contrast, actively used processmodification to create a new technique and generated a newconcept based on their creative vision.

When producing a new series of artworks, an artist may engage in a variety of activities in the formation of an art concept.In a specific instance, a contemporary artist was demonstrated first to draw his ideas on paper, as an initial phase ofdeveloping his art concept. This paper utilizes data from a previous study to analyze the drawings and interviews conductedduring this drawing phase. The results show that the artist used various types of modification of his art-making process. Bychanging his own creative activity, the artist often reflected upon his creative process, asking himself what he really wantedto do, and explored new images in response to unexpected findings and the feeling of confusion at his own drawings.

The process of formation by an artist of an art concept for theproduction of a new series of artwork has not yet beenempirically elucidated. The goal of this study is to describethe process of art concept formation by a contemporary artistthrough quantitative analyses of a text corpus based oninterviews with the artist. From an analysis of the frequencyof occurrence of items of vocabulary in the interview data andthe TF-IDF (term frequency–inverse document frequency),we find that the second of three phases in the artist's creativeprocess was the most critical for the formation of the artconcept, as also shown in our previous qualitative study.Further, based on an analysis of co-occurrence frequencies ofwords, the structure of the art concept is deduced from theimportance of co-occurring vocabulary. By means ofvisualizing the network of co-occurrence analysis, it isclarified that the feature words "The Large Glass" functionedin the first phase as the medium for dividing the structure ofthe concept into two parts. In the second phase, these twoparts of the structure became integrated into one. In the lastphase, the structure of the concept was elaborated on with therevived feature words, "White Noise" and "Duchamp".