Cultivating your intuition is perhaps the most important part of the creative process. My best ideas, I feel, don’t come from me. They come through me.
The following story about one of my favorite artists, Hilma af Klint, highlights the relationship between creativity, intuition, and mysticism.
(This is an excerpt from my book The Art of You: The Essential Guidebook for Reclaiming Your Creativity. Check out the book to read more.)
When people talk about abstract painters, a few names are usually mentioned first: Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock — men who revolutionized the art world in the first half of the twentieth century. What is rarely mentioned is that another relatively unknown artist began painting beautiful abstract canvases before any of them, as early as 1906.
It turns out the father of abstract art isn’t a father at all. She is a mother. And her name is Hilma af Klint.
Born in Sweden in 1862, Hilma af Klint was a precocious creative talent. She attended the Royal Academy of Fine Art in Stockholm, where she developed a signature style of dreamy realism. In 1880, when Hilma was eighteen years old, her sister died suddenly.
Distraught and seeking solace, Hilma began a fascination with spirituality and the occult. She began attending seances where she practiced opening the channel of her consciousness to receive messages from unseen dimensions.
Hilma founded a collective of women known as De Fem (The Five). They met weekly to sit around an altar, pray, meditate, and conduct séances, claiming to receive messages from higher beings by entering a trance.
It was during these seances that Hilma began receiving messages in the form of visual symbols. Setting aside conscious thought, she conjured abstract shapes and geometric patterns through automatic drawing. Little by little, a new mystical visual language began to emerge, as though Hilma was documenting images from the spirit world.
“The pictures were painted directly through me, without any preliminary drawings, and with great force. I had no idea what the paintings were supposed to depict; nevertheless, I worked swiftly and surely, without changing a single brush stroke.” – Hilma af Klint.
By the early 1900s (when Picasso was still in his Blue Period and Kandinsky was painting impressionistic landscapes) Hilma was channeling elaborate abstract paintings, rich with mystical symbolism.
Hilma’s creative process and her spiritual process were one and the same. Her direct and committed relationship with the muse inspired innovative, almost religious, symbolism beyond the reach of the logical mind.
Although Hilma lived to be eighty-one, she remained virtually unknown during her life. She believed the world was not prepared for the daring message and meaning of her work. Only a few of her paintings were displayed during her lifetime. She instructed her family to keep her work hidden until at least twenty years after her death.
The decades passed, art movements rose and fell, and Hilma af Klint’s entire body of work, including more than a thousand paintings and one hundred diaries, sat in storage, untouched and unseen, waiting to be discovered.
Hilma and the spiral temple.
When Hilma af Klint began making abstract paintings, she received a channeled message during a séance. The message instructed her to prepare a collection of work to be displayed inside a spiral temple. Hilma had no idea what or where this temple was, but she dutifully took the assignment to heart, composing a collection of mystical paintings to one day hang inside a spiral temple.
After Hilma passed away in 1944, her collection, which she called “paintings for the temple,” went into a long period of hibernation. Decades passed. The world changed. And the name Hilma af Klint remained unknown.
In 2018, while living in Manhattan, I was scrolling Instagram when I noticed a new art exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum. The paintings were bright, alive, vibrant, new. I didn’t recognize the name of the artist. Assuming she was a fresh face on the art scene, I searched Instagram for her profile, hoping to learn more about this budding new talent.
No profile was found. In fact, the artist had been dead for sixty-nine years. It was Hilma af Klint.
The next day, I attended the exhibit. It was my first time visiting the Guggenheim, a historic building designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright, which opened in 1959. It was unlike any building I had seen before. The entire circular structure was designed as a winding spiral.
The stark white interior and exterior resembled a modern temple. And as I ascended the winding walkway and marveled at the beautiful paintings, I realized that this was it — Hilma’s spiral temple — displaying the work she had prepared specifically for this occasion.
“Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future,” the name of the Guggenheim exhibit, was a roaring success, attended by more than six-hundred thousand people. It was the most visited show ever in the museum’s history.
And the story of art would never be the same.
My new book The Art of You: The Essential Guidebook for Reclaiming Your Creativity is available now. Presented in an engaging visual style, featuring chapters, poems, memes, illustrations, and rituals, The Art of You is designed to help you awaken your inner creator and turn your imagination into reality.
Currently 10% off for a limited time. Check it out.
“The Art of You offers great insights and steps on how to cultivate creativity. This is essential reading for anyone looking to share their unique experience, to foster deep connections, and to inspire others.” ―Yung Pueblo, #1 New York Times bestselling author
I'm going to see Hilma's work at the Bilbao Guggenheim this fall after reading James's book (I live in Madrid)
Hilma is everything!!