Art from Intuition

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Welcome back everyone, thanks for joining in again. I really hope everyone is getting some use out of the material throughout this blog. Keep showing the love because it’s much appreciated! Ok, so let’s get into it…

Intuition, also known as the “gut,” is developed from past experiences and knowledge. If that past knowledge is mediocre, then it can’t reliably guide an artist to create something remarkable.

If you want to see the difference between understanding design principles and doing art solely on intuition, take a look at a book called “Art from Intuition.” Flip through the pages, then compare the art you see to the masters of the past. Quite the difference, don’t you think? I’m not saying that intuition is altogether bad. You should already know my thoughts on intuition if you read THIS. Plus, if you’re creating art and it’s beautiful to you, then that’s what matters the most. But if you want to take your art and elevate it to another level by understanding how to visually communicate, then you’ll have to study composition and design techniques.

When I tried to do an image search and give credit to the above artist I encountered a dilemma. Google Imaging software was so lost in trying to find a match that it suggested some similar looking images. One of those in which appears to be a plate of day old shrimp. The other, a dazed old man in a green shirt. Is this coincidence, or does it give a glimpse into how others are also confused by the lack of visual communication in this piece?

This painting by Dean Nimmer, a well known painter who wrote the book “Art from Intuition”, is an absolute disaster in my opinion. No order, unity, or technique. Just chaos that resembles burnt ketchup and mustard. Now sometimes with this method you could get amazingly lucky and capture design techniques that speak to the viewer, but in this case it falls drastically short.

Here’s an abstract painter, Cheryl Winslow, that lives near me and ships her paintings off every week to eager buyers. She told me that she doesn’t use design techniques, but in this painting she was able to capture a rhythm, variety, and movement. Can you see the difference between this one and the other by Nimmer? Both painters are using guidance from intuition, but only one is fortunate enough to accidentally incorporate design techniques that work and speak to the viewer. If they were both able to learn design techniques, their paintings would not be hit or miss as they are now. They would be popping out zingers left and right!

We’ve all heard the saying, “My 5 year old could do that” and sometimes that stands true. Just because it feels good to make messy scribbles doesn’t make it good art.

Art purely from intuition compared to designed art is night vs day. Chaos vs Beauty. Some intuitive techniques are kinda cool how the artist below takes a lighter and makes soot marks all over the paper, then draws on it. Interesting technique, but the final image has no order. Most of the images in the book are a perfect example of the absence of design. But just think, if you take these unusual techniques and apply some order, some design….then you’ll have the best of both worlds and possibly something worth talking about.

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