This educational study on narrative and symbolic art and its impact on me as artist, researcher, and teacher and ultimately how the use of narrative and symbolism impacts student learning was conducted throughout the school year 2013-2014 in the environment of both my home and my classroom in a south metro Atlanta high school. The research is based on my reflections of my artistic processes, my research of family history, and my observations as I introduced narrative and symbolic art in the classroom. The findings of the study reveal that the roles of artist, teacher, and researcher are significantly interrelated and enhance one another; I also believe that my students’ learning was impacted. While students are at first assigned narrative and symbolic art projects, many begin to extrapolate that art is more meaningful to them when it has a story to tell or includes symbolism with which they associate importance.

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