Artistic beauty is also the beauty of works of art. Therefore, the creation process of artistic beauty is also the creation process of artistic works. From the perspective of human aesthetic activities, the so-called creative process of artistic works is essentially a process in which the aesthetic subject, as the artistic image of the works, gradually shows its own essential strength. Specifically, it is the aesthetic consciousness gradually formed by artists in aesthetic practice, including the process of aesthetic feeling, aesthetic intention and materialization. The following are the main links in the creation:

1, the generation of aesthetic feeling. All artistic beauty creation is based on the artist's aesthetic feeling of objective life. Aesthetic feeling is the primary stage of aesthetic consciousness. Without aesthetic feeling, it is impossible to form aesthetic consciousness and enter the creative process. Aesthetic image is the advanced form of artists' aesthetic consciousness, and the gestation of aesthetics lies in the synthesis of individual and universality, or the unity of representation and concept. This work is usually called "artistic conception" in artistic creation. Artists who are engaged in the creation of art and artistic beauty must take their inner creative desire and impulse as an opportunity, which is inspired by the artist's certain aesthetic feeling. "Yue Ji" said: "Music teachers and students in the sound; It is based on the feelings of people and things. " Zhong Rong said in "Preface to Poetry": "Artifacts and animals are touching, so shake their temperament and dance with them." He also believes that whether it is the ups and downs of nature, the continuation of the four eras, or the joys and sorrows in social life and personnel changes, it is a feeling that arouses the poet's creative impulse, that is, sad poems, how can it be meaningful; Sad for Long song, why sentimental? Zheng Banqiao's bamboo painting theory, which we quoted earlier, vividly describes the artist's creative process and state caused by some aesthetic feeling. About the generation of aesthetic feeling, we can grasp it from three levels:

On the first level, aesthetic feeling is generally inseparable from the direct reflection of perceptual objects, and it is always related to the appearance of objective things. Therefore, people often call it aesthetic intuition and artistic intuition. Of course, this intuition has actually infiltrated into the artist's conscious rationality, which is a complex psychological process including feeling, perception, emotion, understanding, imagination and other factors, but it has not yet risen to the so-called rational understanding. Susan Langer once gave such an example when she talked about the direct grasp of things. Most people can perceive the similarity between their right and left hands through intuition, but first they must find out the similarity between this hand and that hand through thinking. As long as you look at it, you can directly guess the space shape inside the curtain shoe without dissecting it first and then studying it carefully. What he is talking about here is an intuitive grasp of the object. This intuitive grasp is different from scientific rational understanding. There is no need to grasp the opponent's characteristics scientifically, and there is no need to scientifically calculate its internal structure through anatomical curtain. But in this intuitive grasp, it includes both understanding and imagination, otherwise it is impossible to perceive the similarity of hands and guess the spatial form of curtain shoes. What we call awareness and speculation has the nature of understanding and imagination. Art and the creation of artistic beauty have a similar situation.

Second, the artist's aesthetic feeling of the objective world is an intuitive grasp of the perceptual object. Zheng Banqiao talked about "painting bamboo" in another place, which contradicted Su Shi's theory of "planning" and initiated the essence theory of "no planning". It is said that when he draws bamboo, it is thick and thin, short and fat, and his writing is very casual and emotional. This seems to be an unconscious smear without thinking, but it is actually an intuitive grasp of bamboo after long-term observation and experience. The so-called "nothing in the chest" does not mean that there is no bamboo image in the chest, but that this image naturally flows into the pen when painting, as if the author did not realize its existence. Without this aesthetic production process of aesthetic experience from the bamboo in the eyes to the bamboo in the chest, painting is absolutely impossible to achieve the realm of essays, self-contained, spirituality and rationality.

On the third level, aesthetic feeling includes not only rational factors but also emotional factors. The reason why aesthetic feeling is different from general feeling is that its appearance movement and emotional activity are closely combined. When an artist perceives a specific thing in the objective world, on the one hand, he produces a representation of it in his mind, and on the other hand, he produces some emotional experience because there is some positive or negative relationship between it and himself. This situation constitutes the comprehensive movement and integration of appearance, emotion and understanding in aesthetic feeling. Liv Tolstoy cited such a simple example when talking about emotional expression in artistic creation. For example, a boy who was frightened when he met a wolf told the story of his meeting with the wolf. In order to let others experience this feeling in his mind, he described the bright environment and his happy mood before he met the wolf, and then described the image and action of the wolf, the distance between him and the wolf and so on. All this, if a boy experiences what he once experienced when he narrates, is art. Tolstoy used this example to illustrate the whole process of artistic creation. Obviously, in the aesthetic process at this stage, the appearance is also the shape, movement and surrounding environment of the wolf. Understanding is the consciousness between oneself and the wolf, and emotion is the terror it causes. These are intertwined, and the three are intertwined to form aesthetic content.

Aesthetic feeling is the foundation of artistic creation, but because it is always caused by specific images, it focuses on the perceptual intuition of specific objects and has the characteristics of dispersion and individuality. Although there are elements of understanding and imagination in aesthetic feeling, this understanding is limited to the limited scope between subject and object, and imagination can hardly transcend the limited time and space. Therefore, it only belongs to the primary form of artists' aesthetic consciousness. This primary aesthetic consciousness cannot be directly transformed into the artistic image of the work, but it is a valuable stock in the artist's information database and an indispensable perceptual material for the future artistic image. Therefore, for a real artist, he is always enthusiastically involved in life, observing, experiencing and feeling various life patterns, even concrete and vivid details, and constantly enriching and accumulating his own information inventory. The above is the first link of artistic creation, the generation of aesthetic feeling.

2. Cultivation of aesthetic images. Artists get rich aesthetic feelings from their observation and experience of life, which leads to their desire and impulse to create. However, there are no scattered and fragmentary performance materials in the artist's information database. Only by processing, transforming and nurturing a perfect aesthetic image in the artist's mind can it be materialized into a beautiful artistic image. Aesthetic image is an advanced form of artists' aesthetic consciousness. The so-called image, as the name implies, is the unity of meaning and image. Specifically, it refers to the unity of external appearance and internal meaning of things. The appearance of things is individual and concrete things; The meaning of things is universal and conceptual. The idea of image lies in the unity of individual and universality, or the unity of representation and concept. This work is usually called artistic conception in artistic creation.

Artistic conception is of decisive significance to the shaping of artistic image and even the realization of the whole creative process. When talking about the Madonna created by Italian painter Gorresio, Balzac said that long before the Madonna was created, artists had been intoxicated with the joy of enjoying this extraordinary image. He added: A poet, painter or sculptor can make his works feel lifelike, because his creative idea and process are carried out at the same time. This tells us that before the artist puts his own artistic image into the picture, this image has actually matured in his mind, and the future thing is just to give this fresh life to the viewer. This fully illustrates the importance of artistic conception.

The task of artistic conception is to synthesize, process and transform the rich performance materials obtained by artists in the aesthetic stage, so as to make them become aesthetic images with certain life significance. It is precisely because the process of artistic conception follows the general laws of human thinking and has its own characteristics. People generally call this kind of thinking activity with its own characteristics in the artistic conception stage "thinking in images". Therefore, the process of artistic conception is essentially the process of thinking in images. Of course, this does not mean that thinking in images only exists in the artistic conception stage, but that thinking in images is particularly active and has a particularly obvious effect at this stage. In the artistic conception stage, the image thinking activities that artists rely on to nurture aesthetic images are mainly manifested as conscious image movement and imagination activities.