A creative process is a philosophical search, shaped by matters of practice and procedure that extend from the first touch of the artist’s pencil, brush, or chisel to the final decisions about what constitutes completeness.

[…]

Painters and sculptors who remain in their studios grappling with the fundamentals and fine points of representation or abstraction—worrying about Renaissance theories of perspective or Klee’s and Kandinsky’s ideas about plane geometry—can be accused of having their heads in the sand. But there comes a time when certain questions must be asked. What are the artistic traditions that mean the most to you? What is your artistic heritage? Where do you stand?

Jed Perl, “Between Abstraction and Representation”