Cyclicity in creation: from abstraction to figurative, from figurative to abstract

The paramount focus of this article shall be on painting, mainly that of contemporary artists, but apprehending back to their modern predecessors without which some of the aforementioned contemporary painting figurative/abstract would have been inconceivable. The research of the identification of some directions in painting, both in the creative process and in the educational one, is a difficult objective to achieve. The hierarchy and classification of some tendencies, as plastic formulas, represents a challenge only if we consider that any artist crosses over, during his artistic career, several stages of creation. At the same time, the present research aims to bring to attention one of the most significant examples of relating the topicality of artistic creation, with amplifying and renewing the horizon of artistic higher education. These aspects are always, or should be integrated in the teaching of each artist who teaches in art higher education institutions. The authors’ cases are important because they can reveal different aspects of the creation process that on one hand can start with abstraction and find the figurative in it, and on the other hand it can have its roots in reality, a reality that is reduced in simple abstract forms by the process of abstraction. Both cases have interdisciplinary aspects from psychology, philosophy and are related with other aspects of human activity such as memory, imagination, abstraction