What is Artistic Intuition?

For my first blog post, I’d like to talk about artistic intuition. It sounds similar to intuitive art or intuitive painting, but they differ on the basis of intention. Intuitive art is all about letting emotions or feelings put themselves onto a canvas. When creating intuitive art, the artist allows their inner self to give meaning to the medium instead of the piece being the result of technical artistic skill or practice. Artistic intuition, on the other hand, is the manipulation of art through artistic choices/decisions. Artistic intuition has applications everywhere and I think a lot of artists and even people who don’t consider themselves to be artists are unaware of this term but unconsciously use it daily. Some obvious examples would be picking a new color for your living room walls that compliments the floor or alternating the heights of plants in the garden but even changing the margins on a Word document at work can have a similar effect. That’s where artistic intuition accomplishes the most, in choices that alter aesthetics, and that’s also why it’s relevant to visual art. I feel that artistic intuition is the reason you can look at a piece of art and love it, but not be sure why. So many small decisions altered a work in progress to create the final image and the viewer can never really know how many evolutions a piece went through before it was deemed complete. Artistic intuition can come into play before the piece is even started, I’ve talked about the omission of details in a couple of YouTube videos but making choices in regard to your reference(s) before you even start a piece is a good example of artistic intuition. Omission isn’t just leaving out details because you don’t feel like doing them but rather shifting focus from details without significance to the piece to more important elements. I just rambled for 300 words so if you feel like I talked a lot and didn’t say much let me introduce you to Intuition and Art by British philosopher Louis Arnaud Reid.

The intuition is cognitive, conative, and affective. In other words, we come to it from a background of cognitive experience of all kinds; we cognitively perceive the presented object with a just-awakened interest, and we feel about it. Feeling is needed and is essential. But here we have to proceed the greatest circumspection, or we shall fall into a quagmire of subjectivity. As mentioned before, I have written that feelings belong, analytically and abstractly regarded, to the side of the subject and not of the object. And this, if the qualifying phrase is taken seriously, is true

Reid, Louis Arnaud. “Intuition and Art.” Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 15, no. 3, 1981, pp. 27–38. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3332343. Accessed 20 Nov. 2023.

With that being said, be careful not to fall into a quagmire of subjectivity, but trust your artistic intuition and thank you for visiting my blog!