Combining intellectual wit with a humanistic vision, the author explores the various dimensions of the creative consciousness, the nature of the art object as a visual idiom of form and the inevitable contextualization of art forms in the social and historical conditions that impact on artistic creations and which in turn they reshape. These art historical essays are the author's reflective explorations into the visual image which is simultaneously historical and transformational in its density and shifting terrain of meanings at the level of signification, production techniques, and allied technology.