I work impulsively.  The word of the week leads me to my first pencil stroke, and every move or stroke that follows builds upon that last one.  It's a sort of data tree, if you will, rather than a recursive process.  Never go back to the beginning after you've hit "go," or you're delving into the world of information rather than the world of creation. 

So, how do I differentiate creation from information and analysis?  If course, you can't create anything without information.  That's what we mean by "referencing."  But what separates the fine arts from the applied arts, I think, is the way in which we treat that information.  The applied arts, like design or engineering, must account for information every step of the way, as straying from the path of practicality amounts to a faulty design whose habitability is compromised.  I think that's precisely what makes architecture fantastic.  Create with respect to reality. 

The fine arts (annoying an antiquated as that term is...hasn't anyone come up with anything better yet?) place that impetus on design.  What art are designers bringing to the masses?  In the mid-twentieth century, it was a consciousness of all the banal: ubiquitous grids, quotidian lighting schemes, basic materials, the shape of things we see, all boiled down to their reductive selves.  There would have been no Michael Graves or Peter Eisenman in the seventies and eighties without Carl Andre and Sol LeWitt in the fifties and sixties.  There would be no dumbass obsession with holes and voids without Gordon Matta-Clark, and no consciousness of composed earth without Walter de Maria and Michael Heizer.  Design owes much of its conceptual framework to the work of fine art that precede it by decades.  And that fine art can come about only when the artist, while painfully aware of his deBordian situation, can remove himself from reality far enough to create a new world from it.

I think that only happens when reality informs the initial impulse and immediately disappears thereafter.