While exploring the use of abstract shapes in the process of art making I noted that colours come next. Kandinsky (1972) and Rodchenko (Dabrowski, 1998) have noted the use of colour for its inner qualities that are not necessarily connected to the surface. Colours are used by artists for their inner quality, or as inner messages that come within colour, in what can be called ‘abstract colours’. Felice (  paras. 18-19) for example, asserted that colours have a dual quality to them that can be used in art. Felice explains that colours are usually regarded for the emotion that they convey once people see them. Yet, he asserts another quality to colour, that of having an active creative process with nature itself, regardless of the observer. Colours are absorbed and altered in relation to the surfaces on which they are applied, to an extent that colour seems to assume a role with reality which is more prevailing than the role colour assumes in art once being observed by audiences, as he ( para. 12) explains:

‘Painting… it is not born to create specific shapes that need to satisfy the viewer. The paintings are not defined by the understanding of the viewer or what the viewer sees, but rather exist in their own right, and have their own relation to the three-dimensional space in which they were created.’

In that respect I have examined colours not with regard to their visible influence on the viewer’s senses, but rather to their inner independent quality with reality, which artists seem to assert. I have concluded that the use of colour by artists comes to create a sense of movement of inner emotions into the external reality. I focused on vivid colours and transparent for their quality of generating movement, which became a theme in chapter 11:

Chapter 10: Stimulation (Sensing–Feeling–Acknowledging). Chapter 11: Internalisation (Shape–Movement). Chapter 12: Application (Place–Space).

Likewise, my paper presentations in the second year of this research evolved from focusing on inner experience to focusing on the process of transformation of initial inspired image to the actual artefact. Feedback on my paper at the 2^nd International Arts in Society Conference (Kassel University, Germany, August 2007) has demonstrated the immense interest that a presentation on creative processes can stir. I have presented a few films I created and their development, and feedback suggested that there is a need for further study in that area.

Another important conference I took part in was organised by the Consciousness and Experiential Psychology Section of the British Psychological Society, in Oxford, September 2007. For this conference I have presented a poster, not a ‘paper’. It was the poster that served as the trigger to inspire audiences (while at their half-hour tea break between lectures) to approach me and ask about my research. I then gave a short presentation to the people who gathered around me in a similar way that I would give a paper. However, the interesting part was that my artistic poster was inspiring people to approach me, and not a formal way of sitting in a class and listening to a presenter. The custom of poster presentation is not new in this conference, but is followed each year. For me, this was a first and new form in which I could engage in an intellectual academic discussion, triggered by my artistic art work. This was most suitable to that stage in my research where I evolved to explore processes rather than specific moments of inspiration.