Creativity is a pervasive and somewhat revered activity that continues to evade adequate psychological explanation. It is argued here that the failure to adequately account for creativity is due to two things. Firstly, the tendency to locate and conceive of creativity as a set of attributes possessed by the creative individual results in an impoverished account of creativity due to the failure to recognise the broader context from which creativity issues. This context includes: the domain - a particular sphere of knowledge or activity that has a given symbol system, set of research objectives and level of development; and the field, which comprises the collection of individuals who preserve and direct the evolution of this domain through selecting and transmitting new content. It is argued here that any truly illuminating account of creativity must consider the nature of the complex interactions between the constituents of creativity - the person, the domain, and the field - in recognition that instances of creativity are intimately tied to the ideological and evaluative criteria covertly inherent in the broader social context in which that creative activity is embedded. Further, it is argued that there is a need to distinguish between creativity and the particular endeavour in which it is manifest, while also recognising that what creativity is considered to be is inextricably linked to that endeavour. It is concluded that there is no objective construct that is creativity, but rather, what creativity is, is culturally, domain and genre dependant and must be defined as such. Therefore, any attempt to objectify creativity from its domain of issue is flawed, and yet it is the failure to recognise this that lies at the heart of much of the conceptual confusion that surrounds the concept of creativity. It was considered that the art making activity is particularly conducive to illuminating the nature of creativity because: it is an activity that is inherently tied to current ideological conceptualisations about creativity; it is an activity that is embedded in an identifiable social context - the art world; it is an activity that is normally and mistakenly conceived to be free of the evaluative, political and ideological criteria characteristic of other creative activities; and finally, through being process rather than product oriented, art making is thought to represent creativity in its rawest form. Finally, a qualitative analysis of the activities of creatively active people (visual artists), was conducted in the belief that such an approach would illuminate the complex and diverse nature of creative activity, through directly addressing the activities, beliefs, perceptions of those people. Further, it was considered that a qualitative methodology would sufficiently liberate the resulting account of creativity from the restrictive boundaries of any one explanatory framework, and thereby enable the beginnings of a more comprehensive and integrated theory of creativity and art making.