If you’d like to read this post in its original format along with all the illustrations and links please follow this link; https://conta.cc/3Y3lkZK
The human brain is exquisitely attuned to perceiving faces, in clouds, and buildings, on a grilled cheese sandwich. An entire brain region called the fusiform gyrus is dedicated to interpreting faces.
These "face neurons" in people with healthy brains are so overactive that they scream FACE! in many situations where no actual faces can be found. Beautiful symmetrical faces and faces with interesting lines and features draw us into advertising, social media, television, events, and museums. There’s a reason you see faces everywhere.
Your mind evolved the ability to read information from people’s faces such as recognizing who they are, whether they’re paying attention to you, or whether they’re upset or happy to see you or intend harm.
It gives us pleasure to gaze into the eyes of another. “The reward system involved [in looking at faces] generates the same experience of pleasure when, for instance, we enjoy tasty food or happen to win a lottery”, says Olga Chelnokova a PhD candidate at the University of Oslo. “We are very curious about others’ faces, we read stories in them and evaluate their aesthetic value”, says Chelnokova.
As artists we yearn to recreate the emotional complexity of a human face - the essence of the human soul housed just behind the eyes. We gaze at our subjects and feel delight until we look down at our drawings. Despite our brain’s ability to make almost anything into a face, capturing a likeness is another story.
This student drawing below has all the features of a face but you wouldn’t be able to use this drawing to identify this woman in a crowd. Drawing portraits is a skill that’s difficult to fake and tedious to learn.
It doesn’t help that our minds work against our drawing ability. We tend to misobserve what’s right in front of us. When you look at a face your mind spends the most time looking at the subject’s eyes, then the mouth, and almost no time at all on the rest of the face. So what your mind sees looks like a child’s drawing with great big eyes, a big mouth, almost no nose, and the top of the head missing.
Look at this heat map of Olga Chelnokova to see how her subjects observed her.
When my students and artist friends come to me for help drawing portraits and characterizations of their beloved family members, and friends, I almost always start by introducing them to Andrew Loomis.
The Loomis method will not make you into a master portrait artist overnight. But I guarantee your portraits will improve and you will not need to revise as often as I used to.
Andrew Loomis was born in 1892. After studying art, he moved to Chicago where he opened his own studio - working in editorial and advertising for most of the top clients of the time, including Kellogg's, Coca Cola, Lucky Strike and many others. He also became renowned as an art teacher and his instructional books on illustration and art are still acclaimed classics in the field. He died in 1959.
Using the method Loomis developed we can find the landmarks for all the features in a “typical or ideal” human head.
Step by step he divides the head into basic geometric shapes - a sphere for the cranium and a block for the jaw and cheekbones. Each feature on the face has a specific location relative to the geometric configuration set up in the early stages of the drawing process. It is simple to apply and easy to use when drawing from life or from imagination. This method accurately locates all the features.
We are each as individual in our appearance as snowflakes yet at the same time we are also constrained within a symmetrical harmonic design of the skull that places the eyes, the ears, the nose and the mouth all in roughly the same place on every head, regardless of race, sex or age. Knowing this standard makes our drawing task so much easier.
When you apply the “standard” proportions of the face before beginning to draw the details of the individual’s features there’s less chance you’ll have one eye larger than another or the ears at different heights. Once you have placed the “standard” head in the correct position you can begin the more enjoyable task of observing the detailed variations of your subject from the standard - is the jaw wider, the mouth smaller, the nose larger?
When I first began drawing portraits I had not yet learned this system so I often had to re-draw and draw my faces over and over again to find a likeness to my subject.
Once I discovered Andrew Loomis’s method for drawing the proportions of the head I felt the scales fall from my eyes and the lights go on in my mind. It was like hitting the jackpot for my figure-drawing skills. That’s why I want to share my knowledge with you. When I give away what I’ve learned, I still get to keep my own knowledge but that knowledge multiplies and expands as it ripples out into the world.
Let's step through the Loomis Method. We’re going to start with a full-face view.
The first step is to draw a circle that encompasses the top of the head. The top of the circle should just touch the top of the skull and the bottom of the circle should be just below the nose as shown in the photo below.
Next, draw a vertical line through the center of the face. This divides your face into two symmetrical halves.
Draw a perpendicular horizontal line that divides your circle into four equal quarters. This horizontal designates the brow line - the skull bone above your eyesockets where your eyebrows grow.
Place a box inside your circle so that all four corners touch the edge of the circle. You should now have a box with four equal squares inside it.
The top of the circle describes the top of the skull
The top horizontal line defines the hairline
The middle horizontal line describes the brow line and the top of the ears.
The lower horizontal line touches the bottom of the nose and the bottom of the ears.
The outside vertical lines touch the sides of the skull
The ears are contained outside the box yet within the outer edges of the circle.
Now add two more of the same size boxes extending below your circle. You should have six boxes altogether. The chin will fall inside these two new boxes. There is a lot of variation in the shape of chins but the face is almost always divided into three equal parts.
Hair to Eyebrows.
Eyebrows to Nose.
Nose to Chin.
The eyes are located on a line halfway from the top of the head to the bottom of the chin. Measure this and draw a new horizontal line for the eyes.
The center of the eyes (the pupils) is halfway from the centerline of the face to the outside edge of the skull (the box). This is also the outer edge of the mouth expression marks.
The inner corner of the eye and the outside of the nose are halfway from the center of the eye to the center of the face.
The ears start at the brow line and go to the bottom of the nose. They are generally contained within the circle.
There is one eye distance between the eyes and from the outer edge of the eye to the outer edge of the ear. The entire face from ear to ear measures 5 eyes wide.
Last, we will divide the space between the nose and chin into three equal parts. The line where the lips meet in a neutral expression will be ⅓ of the distance from the bottom of the nose to the chin. It is just a coincidence that in this image the bottom of the circle touches the mouth.
There are many variations in the size and shape of a mouth. The mouth changes shape and dimension with expression but this is the location for a mouth in a neutral expression.
What you have now is a map for the location of all the features on a “standard” head. Memorizing this map will prove to be worth the time invested when you want to capture how the head moves in space. Once you can easily place the standard head in the same position as your subject then you will have the ability to convey emotion through gesture and body language.
If you’d like to practice drawing faces this way visit this website for links to free reference photos; https://doncorgi.com/blog/portrait-reference-photos/
I recommend you lower the opacity when you print out the image and draw your Loomis guidelines on top. In my experience it takes a few practice runs to "get" how this works and internalize all of the landmarks in different positions of the head.
Here is my favorite video tutorial on how to use the Loomis Method.
Stan Prokopenko offers a whole series of tutorials on the Loomis method. He makes them entertaining and fun. I highly recommend his entire Loomis series.
Once you have your standard head with the correct geometric placements for each of the features your next step will be drawing each feature accurately, incorporating and adapting to the detailed variations you observe in your subject.
I am not going into detail on how to draw each feature in this essay, but I may devote some time to it in a future newsletter.
The real power of the Loomis method comes when we use these same landmarks to describe the human head as it moves in three-dimensional space.
Drawing the Head in Three Dimensions:
Again, we start with a circle (sphere) to describe the shape of the skull.
Ellipse: An oval (ellipse) describes the side plane of the skull. It is ⅔ the height of the sphere and does not touch the top or bottom of the sphere but it will touch the back.
The top of the ellipse will define the hairline and the bottom of the ellipse will correspond with the bottom of the nose.
The top left portion of the ellipse corresponds to the brow bone on the forehead to the end of the eyebrow. This is where the front plane of the forehead meets the side plane of the skull.
Once we know how much of the side plane we are seeing we can determine the width of our ellipse. The width of the ellipse determines how much of the side plane of the head we can see and the direction our subject is looking.
Next, we will want to find the tilt of the head.
We find the angle of the horizontal diameter of our ellipse by following the line from the top of the ear to the eyebrow on the figure we are observing.
If the head tilts up then this line will tilt up, if the head tilts down the line will point down.
Once we know the angle of the ear-to-brow line we can continue that line across the front plane of the head to map out our brow line.
Create a vertical line inside the small ellipse perpendicular to the brow angle. The vertical centerline of the face and the vertical centerline of the ellipse should be parallel.
The intersection of these two lines on the ellipse will also give you the placement of the side plane of the face and the ear. The ear will be placed in the bottom quarter of the ellipse.
The bottom one-third of the face is the chin. The distance of the nose to the chin will be the same measurement as the nose to brow line or the brow to hairline.
The side plane of the jaw is a curve that starts at the center cross marks of the ellipse and slopes in an arc to the bottom of the chin. The arc of this line will vary a lot from individual to individual.
Using this simple method we have drawn a basic perspective placement for our entire head.
All features - eyes, nose, and mouth will have the same placements and spacings as in the front view.
The features are centered around a line of symmetry that runs from the brow to the chin. The more symmetrical the features the more we perceive the individual as "beautiful". Notice Loomis' comments on female beauty in the notes below.
The eye-line is halfway from the top of the skull to the chin,
The center of the eye is halfway from the centerline of the front plane to the outside edge of the ellipse.
The mouth-line is 1/3 of the distance from the nose to the chin.
The eyes are one eye width apart and have one eye width to the ear
The mouth expression lines will go to the center of the eyes.
Look at the examples below to see how effective this method is for correctly sizing and locating the features on the head in a variety of ways.
See how Loomis uses them to exaggerate and distort the head to create caricatures. You can use this to design your own Anime characters and more.
If you’re ready to keep going with this here are links to some more of Proko’s great videos on the subject:
The geometric placements of the features will not change much when you add expression. I recommend learning to accurately draw faces with neutral expressions before moving on to how the muscles and skin stretch to form all the possible emotions a face can convey. Let me know if you’d like me to write an article on how to easily capture facial expressions.
Whether you’re an established artist seeking new horizons or a budding creative looking to elevate your work I hope I have given you some ideas to on how you can quickly improve your portrait drawing skills. If you’d like to dedicate more time to becoming proficient at drawing portraits I’d love to support your artistic development. If you would like my mentorship, guidance, and advice in exploring your own artistic path please reach out to me. It makes me happy to share my insights and my knowledge with you.
If someone shared this newsletter with you and you'd like to subscribe, please reach out to me below with your email address. I promise, no spam, no overloading your inbox, just the good stuff.
I welcome the opportunity for connection, conversation, cooperation, collaboration, and commissions.
With Light and Delight
Susan
If you’d like to read this article in its original format along with all the illustrations please follow this link:
Is creative talent, be it novelistic, musical, or artistic, something you’re born with, or is it something that anyone, with practice and dedication, can acquire?
Were you born an artist? Are creative people sprinkled throughout your family tree? Did you start drawing, dancing, or writing as soon as you could speak? Or, did it take time for you to uncover and develop your gifts?
Artistic talent appears to be a heritable legacy passed through generations in families. Consider the three generations of world-class artists in the Wyeth family, NC, Andrew, and Jamie. The Waugh family produced three generations of novelists: Arthur, Alec, and Evelyn, then Auberon (Evelyn’s son). Musicians, painters, and poets offer hundreds of examples like these making it tempting to ascribe creativity to a genetic trait. Yet whether or not talent and creativity are products of nature, a gift must be nurtured, recognized, and supported to blossom.
Imagine growing up with an artist mother or father. Artists' children have obvious advantages. Not only is art practiced and encouraged at home, parents are more likely than most to tolerate the dualities of creativity: the interplay between focused and free-floating thought, extroversion, and introversion. For the children of artists creativity is an intimate force shaping their lives. Art becomes a shared experience that strengthens bonds through creativity and common pursuits.
These children, observing their parent's relationship to their art, see creativity as alternately joyful, challenging, and painful. Watching their parents create art sparks their artistic passion. Influenced and inspired by their parents’ creativity, there’s a strong chance a child will grow up to become an artist.
I had the good fortune to grow up in a multi-generational family of artists. My maternal grandmother, Margaret Folsom McFarlin studied at the Boston Museum School and painted in Provincetown with Charles Webster Hawthorne. Below are a few examples of her work.
My mother Alison M. Convery attended Massachusetts College of Art before she moved to Martha’s Vineyard to get married. She wrote and illustrated “The Child’s Guide to Martha’s Vineyard” in 1970. Her book has been reprinted four times. My mother has been an exhibiting member of the Martha’s Vineyard Art Association (MVAA) since 1960 and served on the board for over 40 years. This summer the MVAA hosted a retrospective of her paintings in honor of her 90th birthday. Here is a Martha’s Vineyard Times article written about the event.
My father Leo P. Convery is an accomplished woodcarver whose evocative fish and birds have won first place many times at the Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Fair. My dad has always appreciated fine craftsmanship and collected antique and contemporary bird carvings. My dad has also been known to fix or build almost anything in his workshop. But, wood carving was not my dad’s primary life career, he took his first classes after age 60 to keep busy during winters in Florida. I am particularly proud of the quality of his creations despite severe arthritis and a painful shoulder injury.
My sister, Betsi Convery-Luce recently earned a master's degree in animal photography from Animal Image Makers. Her photography brand is Bark Furtography and she specializes in capturing the essence and whimsical spirit of animals. Betsi also has a bachelor’s degree in pastry from Johnson & Wales University and trained at The Cordon Bleu in Paris. She bakes fabulous floral cupcakes and used to create elaborate wedding cakes. While her children were small Betsi designed and sewed adorable one-of-a-kind children’s clothing using the label Bumbly Bee Originals.
Even my children have artistic leanings. My 25-year-old son, Daniel Foltz is a talented photographer specializing in resort photography and portraiture. He studies Hospitality Management at Broward College and works for the Four Seasons in Fort Lauderdale.
My 23-year-old son, Jack Foltz is a food artist. Jack studied Culinary Arts at Johnson and Wales and now studies hospitality management at Florida International University. During the summer he is the chef for a private club on Martha’s Vineyard. His culinary creations are mouthwatering to eat and beautifully designed in their presentation. He has known he wanted to be a chef since he was 14.
I wish I had taken a photo of the swordfish with pomegranate and pistachio salsa over celeriac mashed potatoes he made for us this summer. My parents declared it one of the most delicious meals they've ever eaten.
I spent most of August on Martha’s Vineyard enjoying my family. Art is something that ties us together as a family. We celebrated my mom’s 90th birthday with a retrospective show of her artwork and we had the fun of simultaneously displaying our artwork at the annual Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Fair. My mom, my dad, my sister, and I all earned ribbons and small cash prizes.
Every year we take a day to go gallery hopping and out to lunch. This year a highlight for us was visiting the Moore Family Gallery. Andrew Gordon Moore is a realist painter, working in watercolor, egg tempera, and oil. He is a hunter, fisherman, sailor, and self-taught naturalist, the world outdoors is his source. He shares the gallery with his daughter Hannah and son Gordon who are also amazing artists. We spent an enjoyable hour with them. It's inspiring to meet other families who create together.
Artistic families face particular challenges. Each individual has to carve out their own identity not only in their chosen medium but also in the context of their parents' career choices. When a successful artist parent and child work in the same discipline there is a struggle to move away from under the shadow of the parent. The evolution in roles from the child as muse or apprentice to peer is a challenging passage as well. For this reason, many artistic children choose quite different media or forms from their parents.
Like many families, my parents believe art is a wonderful hobby but a poor choice for earning income. This made it especially difficult for me when I was in college and I abandoned my art for nearly 20 years instead of wrestling with the various modes art could lead to financial rewards.
What I found most helpful about growing up in an artistic family was the encouragement to use my creativity to problem-solve new and unconventional solutions to my dilemmas. Creativity is a superpower that applies to any endeavor. Understanding how to break away from the status quo and invent novel and unexpected solutions is useful whether you are a lawyer, an engineer, a scientist, a contractor, or an entrepreneur. Art teaches that better than almost any other subject area.
As a teacher, I cultivate an environment for my student family that makes creating art inevitable. Pushing boundaries, trying new approaches, and embracing failure as an opportunity for growth, empower confidence and motivation. Open communication, encouraging diverse perspectives, and fostering a culture of experimentation and risk-taking are a few of the ways I build a creatively nurturing environment for my students and my children.
Passing on creativity as a parent or a teacher requires a mindset of generosity and a genuine desire to uplift others. This means celebrating the successes of our children, our students, and our peers, offering support during moments of struggle, and recognizing the potential for greatness in everyone we encounter.
By acknowledging and uplifting the creative spark within others, we contribute to a collective energy that propels creativity forward.
There is no need for your art family to be the same as your birth family. You can surround yourself with highly creative people in the workplace, in the community, or within your genetic family. When you have other people modeling how to respond to challenge, triumph, and discouragement it gives you the confidence to embark on your own creative journey.
I firmly believe creativity is contagious, and the ability to pass it on is one of the greatest gifts we can give to the world. When we embrace the power of our own creativity and share it with others, we create a ripple effect that has the potential to touch the lives of countless individuals.
Whether you’re an established artist seeking new horizons or a budding creative looking to elevate your work I hope I have given you some ideas to expand your artistic potential.
Perhaps, I can invite you to become a member of my artistic “family” where I can support your artistic development. If you would like my mentorship, guidance, and advice in exploring your own artistic path please reach out to me. It makes me happy to share my insights and my knowledge with you.
If someone shared this newsletter with you and you'd like to subscribe, please reach out to me below with your email address. I promise, no spam, no overloading your inbox, just the good stuff.
I welcome the opportunity for connection, conversation, cooperation, collaboration, and commissions.
With Light and Delight
Susan
My resources for this month's newsletter were:
If you'd like to read this post in its original format with the original illustrations please follow this link: https://conta.cc/3A2tyYx
July was a month of change at home and worldwide. It is an exciting time to be a woman. For the first time, 50 percent of the athletes competing in the Summer Olympics are women and we have a woman leading the Democratic campaign for President. I was encouraged to learn there are 369 female billionaires in 2024! I am hopeful about the future for you, our country, and women like me. I am grateful to all the empowered women who crashed the glass ceilings and cleared the paths for us to live full and vibrant lives as mothers, artists, executives, performers, athletes, and politicians. I strongly believe the world will be a better place when every human being is encouraged to follow their internal guidance and share their own personal genius with the world.
This month I am excited to honor one of my favorite empowered childless cat ladies from the art world, Hilma af Klint. It is her extraordinary achievement to attain monumental fame following an inward path. She was a woman before her time. The 2018 Guggenheim Museum retrospective of her work was titled "Paintings for the Future"
Described as a pioneering mystic and medium Hilma af Klint was paradoxically delicate and powerful, working quietly and privately away from the art world, Hilma rocked the art world and rewrote art history when it was discovered that she created large abstract canvases five years prior to the first by Wassily Kandinsky and experimented- with writing and drawing guided by the unconscious decades before the Surrealists.
af Klint's sensitivity to the ethereal was married to an analytical and scientific way of navigating the world. She was an eager botanist, well-read in natural sciences and world religions. She was wise enough to stipulate that her works, comprising over 1,300 paintings, 100 texts, and 26,000 pages of notes and sketches, were not to be shown for 20 years following her death, and she also stated that no work could be sold separately, ensuring that her artworks could not become misunderstood commodities.
As a human able to renounce the ego at a time in history when building a cult of personality was often a key to success, af Klint stands apart for her commitment to a path of intuitive intelligence and humility.
Af Klint's art combined geometry, figuration, symbolism, language, scientific research, and religion in a radical new way. Her route to abstraction drew from an interest in mathematics and from her studies of organic growth, including shells and flowers, all culminating in a desire to portray life through a spiritual lens. She was fascinated by the scientific discoveries of her time, Darwinism, the X-ray machine, microscopy, electromagnetic waves, and telegraphy.
Childhood:
As a female artist at the start of the 20th century, af Klint received only some of the support she needed. Born the fourth of five children into a prominent Swedish family — her father was a naval officer and her grandfather was a nautical cartographer, Hilma first attended the Technical School, now known as Konstfack, studying classical portraiture. Following the death of her ten-year-old sister, Hermina when af Klint was just eighteen years old Hilma began an investigation of spiritual work. attending séances, and mystical group meetings to create a dialogue with the spirit world.
Education:
At the age of twenty, in 1882, Hilma went to study at the Royal Academy of Arts in Stockholm. She remained at the Academy for a subsequent five years, continuing her classical art training. She was fortunate the Scandinavian education system already admitted both men and women to their Academies (unlike France and Germany) and it was not uncommon for women to make a living from their art.
After graduating with honors in 1887, Hilma was awarded a scholarship in the form of a shared art studio in Stockholm's artist quarter, where her landscapes and portraits quickly became the source of her financial independence and stability. af Klint found commercial success as an artist in Stockholm. In collaboration with fellow art student Anna Cassel, she illustrated a book on horse surgery written by John Vennerholm, the director of the Veterinary Institute in Stockholm. She also served as secretary of the Association of Swedish Women Artists.
Spiritualism and Anthroposophy
Af Klint became increasingly interested in Spiritualism—a movement based on the notion that a spiritual realm exists, and that people on Earth can interact with its inhabitants. Spiritualism and other mystical movements became popular across Europe around the turn of the century, especially among artists. These ideologies offered a way for people to reinterpret their religious beliefs in the context of rapid scientific advancement and a new awareness of the plurality of religions.
In 1889 af Klint joined the Swedish Lodge of the Theosophical Society. Theosophy was founded by the Russian philosopher, Madame Blavatsky, and Anthroposophy was a spiritual movement developed by the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner, who aimed to define a 'spiritual science', deeply rooted in the idea that spirituality could be rationally understood through both science and art. She joined the Edelweiss Society, a Stockholm association that combined Christian ideas, theosophical teachings and spiritualism.
The Five:
In 1896 af Klint began meeting regularly with four other female artists from the Edelweiss Society, Anna Cassel, Cornelia Cederberg, Sigrid Hedman and Mathilda Nilsson to explore spiritual realms through meditation and séances. The Five, active until 1908, recorded messages from higher spirits referred to as The High Masters. In trancelike states, the group communicated with mystic beings Amaliel, Ananda, Clemens, Esther, Georg, and Gregor – understood to be intermediaries of The High Masters – transcribing their messages via automatic writing and drawing.
By 1904, the High Masters began calling for a temple filled with paintings to be created. During a séance, af Klint heard a voice telling her to make paintings 'on an astral plane' in order to 'proclaim a new philosophy of life'. This was essentially a celestial commission, "from the entity Amaliel who told her to paint the 'immortal aspects of man".
The Commission:
Historians once believed that only af Klint answered the call. But several scholars now say that Anna Cassel, another artist from the Five, was responsible for 14 paintings from a 1906-7 series called “Primordial Chaos”, a procession of images meant to illustrate the birth of the world and the dualities of life, as well as one painting from the 1907 “Eros” series. More may be discovered to be collective works from the group.
The year 1907 is imprinted on the minds of many people drawn to modern art as the year it all began — when Picasso opened the path to Cubism with the splintered forms of “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.” Equally startling, 1907 is at least five years before the triumvirate of European geniuses viewed as the primary innovators of modernist abstraction — Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian — had their breakthroughs, primarily during World War I.
When the other four members declined the commission, af Klint accepted and undertook a full year of preparation, praying and fasting, to receive the transmission of many of her most famous works. From 1906 at age 44, af Klint embarked on her most prolific phase of abstract painting. Culminating in 1915, she produced 193 works, each of which belonged to one of six series all over-arched by the larger body called Paintings for the Temple.
Paintings for the Temple:
In 1907, af Klint claimed to receive a message indicating that she should be the leader of the group. The other four refused to accept this new order and soon the group disintegrated and ceased to work collectively. From this point on af Klint focused entirely on the great commission known as The Paintings for the Temple.
The title for the artist's most important body of work, Paintings for the Temple is significant. It suggests that the canvases require a specific architectural 'home' and that they are designed to help viewers transcend beyond mortal and earthy realms. Af Klint does not make reference to any particular religion, ( she does not use the word church, synagogue, or mosque) but instead aspires to build a 'temple', a universal place of worship dedicated to seeking balance through the union of opposites.
She envisioned the temple as a four-story building centered around a spiral staircase, similar to the Guggenheim. Tracey Bashkoff, the Guggenheim museum’s director of collections points out that af Klint conceived of this structure around 1930, just as Hilla Rebay, the female abstract painter who was a founder of the Guggenheim, began imagining its spiral.
Rudolf Steiner:
While the rest of the world may not have been aware of af Klint’s art, at least one important philosopher was. In 1908, af Klint reached out to Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian founder of Anthroposophy, to ask for his thoughts on her paintings. Steiner, like af Klint, was involved in some of the day’s more out-there forms of spirituality and he pioneered the idea that there is a world beyond this one that informs the human experience. Much to af Klint's disappointment and distress, although attracted to individual works, Steiner disapproved of the artist's self-proclaimed role as 'medium' and advised her not to let anybody see the paintings for the next 50 years. Even later on, when Steiner was opening an Anthroposophy center in Dornach, af Klint approached the philosopher once again, hoping that he might want her mystical paintings for it. He rebuffed her. There is even some conjecture that Steiner may have shown images af Klint’s work to Kandinsky as Kandinsky was also a follower.
After his correspondence, af Klint took a four-year hiatus from art-making, using her time instead to attend to her mother, who had suddenly gone blind.
From 1912 onwards Hilma continued to paint the temple series with augmented vigor, always maintaining her public persona of being a portrait, and landscape artist and keeping her more significant personal work a secret.
Metaphysical Medium:
After 1915, once the Paintings for the Temple had been completed, af Klimt recorded that her 'divine guidance' had come to an end. In turn, the artist's approach to painting, mainly according to size and medium, changed. Firstly her oil paintings on canvas became smaller (as had been previously in her Primordial Chaos series) and then she began to experiment with watercolor on paper, returning to a more "automatic" process adopted in early meetings with 'The Five'.
During 1917 she wrote over 1,200 pages entitled Studier över Själslivet (Studies of the Life of the Soul), detailing her experience as a metaphysical medium.
Later years,
Af Klint’s mother died in 1920, and subsequently, she began another highly creative year, predominantly exploring world religions and studying the scientific intricacies of flowers and trees. She moved to Helsingborg, a coastal city in Southern Sweden, and between 1921 and 1930 often visited the Goetheanum in Switzerland (the world center for the Anthroposophy Movement), joining the Anthroposophy society, meeting Rudolf Steiner again, and became deeply immersed in his theories and ideas. During this time, af Klint was highly concerned with the legacy of her work, cataloging and photographing her paintings, documenting her practice, writing in her journals and sketchbooks, and reviewing previous discoveries.
At an old age, she insightfully understood that her works would not be appreciated by the audience of her time, so she left all of her creations to her nephew, stipulating in her will that they should only be made public twenty years after her death. Her nephew Erik af Klint, together with the Anthrosophical Society, inherited some 1300 paintings and 124 notebooks comprising more than 26,000 handwritten and typed pages When she died in 1944, almost 82 years old, none of her abstract works had ever been shown to the public.
The Work Revealed:
It wasn’t until 1987 that her work began appearing at major institutions. One large canvas was featured in a Los Angeles County Museum of Art survey of spiritualism and abstraction; two years later, the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in New York gave her canvases a solo showcase organized by artist R. H. Quaytman. Yet her work remained outside the spotlight for decades—until, in 2013, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm mounted a traveling retrospective that became a surprise hit. Six years later, in 2018, the Guggenheim Museum in New York stated that its af Klint retrospective, received 600,000 visitors, making it the most widely seen exhibition the museum had ever done.
The Guggenheim exhibition, “Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future.” gave an inkling of af Klint’s parallel lives, following “The Ten Largest” with a small display of conventional but solid portraits, watercolors of plants and one landscape painting, primarily from the 1890s. Then it plunged — as she did — into her spiritually-guided work.
The Ten Largest:
“The Ten Largest” envelop you in hues from dusty orange to pale pinks and lavenders, tumbling compositions of circles, spirals, and pinwheels, and unfurling ribbonlike lines that sometimes form mysterious letters and words. The scale of the motifs and the paintings’ sheer size (10 feet by nearly 9 feet) invite you to step in and float away to the music of the spheres. That they are rendered in tempera on paper, lighter than oil on canvas but still quite painterly, contributes to their levitating power. In their wit, ebullience, multiple references, and palette, “The Ten Largest” seem utterly contemporary, made-yesterday fresh. But all were created in 1907.
It’s not surprising to learn that “The Ten Largest” depicts the human life cycle. The folkloric motifs themselves suggest fertilization and gestation, while the fading color and emptying fields of the later paintings in the series — including “No. 9, Old Age” — intimate a leave-taking.
The Guggenheim Show:
As the work proceeded up the Guggenheim spiral, af Klint continued to surprise, if not always with the jaw-dropping impact of the “Ten.” In the 26 small paintings of “Primordial Chaos” of 1906-7, a series of images meant to illustrate the birth of the world and the dualities of life, she used blue and yellow (colors she anointed as female and male) and green, to wrest abstraction from a world of squirming spermatozoa, notational charts, decorative writing and a horseshoe crab that evokes a flying saucer, with three exhausts.
As with her religious interests, af Klint was not a visual monotheist. There’s a continual fluctuation in forms, references and degrees of abstraction. The richly mixed-media “Tree of Knowledge” drawings from 1913 reference of Art Nouveau, starting with a silhouette reminiscent of a toadstool — or a perfume bottle. The “Swan” series culminates in paintings whose segmented targets on red or black anticipate the later abstraction of Kenneth Noland, the 1960s Color Fielder.
Seeing the Future:
The rivalry between the artist’s family (which appoints a board chairman) and the Anthroposophical Society (which appoints trustees) has delayed initiatives, including plans for a temple to preserve the artist’s work. Both sides have characterized the discord as the inevitable consequence of greed, the unfortunate byproduct of af Klint’s sudden fame and the sharp trajectory of the market for her work. Even as the impact of these discoveries is defined and debated, the people charged with protecting her legacy are at odds. Three lawsuits in Swedish courts have challenged who should control the foundation created in af Klint’s name that oversees the fate of nearly 1,300 paintings and have raised questions about whether some of the caretakers are seeking to profit from her newfound fame. The infighting and court battles could imperil museum loans as well as hundreds of thousands of dollars in licensing deals.
Hilma af Klint was utterly unique. No one had created paintings like hers before – so monumental in scale, with such radiant colour combinations, enigmatic symbols and other-worldly shapes. In an era of limited creative freedom for women, her paintings became an outlet for her exceptional intelligence, spiritual quest and ground-breaking artistic vision.
Truth and Meaning:
Although we remain far away from the harmonious world that af Klint was working towards, she continues to be a powerful role model for women artists. Her devotion to the inward search for true meaning and truth instead of pursuing self-promotion assures young artists that great leaps forward often require isolation and reflection. The contemporary German artists, Kerstin Brätsch and Adele Röder (together known as 'Das Institut'), interested like af Klint in expression of the unconscious and the difficult to decipher, cite af Klint as one of their "heroes".
Hilma af Klint is one of my art heroes. She models for me what’s possible when you stop following the crowd, commit fully to your internal guidance, and share your personal genius with the world.
Whether you’re an established artist seeking new horizons or a budding creative looking to elevate your work I hope I have given you some ideas to expand your artistic potential. Perhaps, like Hilma af Klint you are interested in pursuing the interior world inside your unconscious mind or you'd like to create art that will only be understood in the future. If you would like my mentorship, guidance, and advice in exploring your own artistic path please reach out to me. It makes me happy to share my insights and my knowledge with you.
If someone shared this newsletter with you and you'd like to subscribe, please reach out to me using the email address below. I promise, no spam, no overloading your inbox, just the good stuff.
I welcome the opportunity for connection, conversation, cooperation, collaboration, and commissions.
With Light and Delight
Susan
