Meanings of art creation in artists' lives

This thesis is questioning the meanings of artistic creation. It is divided into two parts - theoretical and empirical. The first part introduces the topic through seven fundamental psychological approaches. The second part tracks the question of the meanings of artistic creation using qualitative half-structured interviews with three painters. During the interview analysis and interpretation, additional text and image documents are included as supplementary sources. Subjectively important topics that are linked to individual's artistic creation formed their so-called internal story of creation as the first output of analysis and data interpretation. Moreover, all three stories are compared with psychological approaches within the model of De Botton and Armstrong (2014), extended by a mutual comparison among artists and unification of various psychological approaches. Key words: creation, meaning, art, purpose, value