ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with an examination of creativity and examples of successful, creative artistic endeavors. It considers two neuropsychological disorders that can affect creativity of artists, frontal-temporal dementia and bipolar disorder. The chapter summarizes systematic investigations that explore the meaning of creativity and describes the creative process, and relate this information to human imagination and perceptual processes in visual art. Creativity can be linked to perception through an analysis of the intelligence process. One situation when the creative process is clearly linked to perception is when successful artists are able to extend the period in which perceptual closure takes place. The stages are preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification. The artist's imagination is an important faculty that he or she possesses because it provides a multilayered canvas for meaning. Surrealism was motivated primarily by the prevailing psychological theory of the time, psychoanalysis, and by the political ideology of revolution.
