Traditionally, the artist has been trained to regard her creative process as something that should be kept to herself.

After investing all this time in creating their paintings, when they were finished, the artists didn’t triumphantly gaze at what they had made and show it off and seek out praise for it. Almost all of them simply put the painting away and started working on another

This is a book about following associations—and about how they cohere into something tangible. And, in retrospect, this string (how my mind was looking to put something together before I was aware of it) was this book’s genesis: If I could somehow make the process legible, I might find making art myself less intimidating and begin to make headway.

Artists do not create contexts; they work within them. Context is the web of complex circumstances in which artists work in relation to their physical environment, historical trends and traditions, social movements, cultural values, intellectual perspectives, personal commitments, and more. Art originates from within a context. Likewise, art is rec