This is a pared-down, demystified overview of the mental operations involved with creating things aesthetic, i.e., art, design, and the like. It is a disarmingly clearheaded and unsentimental look at the creative process by an eminent creator. The book’s photographs and design serve as an example of what the creative process, at its most sophisticated, can yield. Leonard Koren, who trained as an artist and architect, was a founding member of The Los Angeles Fine Arts Squad, a wall-painting collective. In 1976 he created WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing, an avant-garde publication seminal in the development of postmodern aesthetics. Koren has subsequently written numerous books about art, design, and aesthetics. among them are Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers (the classic volume on the beauty of things imperfect, impermanent and incomplete), What Artists Do, and Musings of a Curious Aesthete.
