IMAGINATION IN THE ARTISTIC CREATION PROCESS

Abstract

This article examines the role of imagination as a fundamental factor in the process of artistic creation, understanding art as a free activity that generates its own rules throughout its development. The author argues that a work of art is the product of imagination endowed with aesthetic value and the result of the artist’s individual intellectual activity. Through creative fantasy, inspiration, and improvisation, the artist constructs fictional worlds parallel to empirical reality. The study analyzes the artist as the subject of creation, characterized by a dual personality: an empirical one related to everyday life, and an artistic or ideal one that emerges during the creative act. The article explores imagination in its reproductive, creative, and productive dimensions, emphasizing its ability to make the invisible visible and to give sensible form to what is absent. It also addresses the relationship between form and content, arguing that both constitute an inseparable unity within the artwork, with form functioning as the material embodiment of meaning. Finally, the creative process is described as beginning with an initial idea, which gradually takes shape through semantic and formal resources until it becomes a coherent aesthetic object. The article concludes that imagination, together with the artist’s talent and mastery, constitutes the essential core of all artistic creation.