ABSTRACT
This chapter explores on those people who had sustained their involvement in creative work. It also explains the talk of research participants who can be seen to have reached a mature point in a creative career, in that all of them had completed a programme of art college study ten or more years prior to being interviewed and continued to define themselves in terms of their creative work, although sometimes with difficulty. Whilst the mature creatives who were interviewed were not attempting to emulate the distinctive practices associated with the college experience and environment, they did nevertheless highlight the need for encouragement and support for their work, pointing to the tension between productive creative solitude and potentially destructive isolation when encouragement is not forthcoming. It is this depiction of creative work as a socially constituted and mediated process that marked out many mature creatives' accounts of their lives and work from those of aspirants.
