Mixed media intuitive abstract landscapes

These mini mixed media abstract landscape sketches were created without any planning or stopping to analyse. Many artists refer to this unplanned way of working, making it up as you go, as “intuitive art-making”.

This is a collection of all the ones that I liked in the end. About half of the sketches I created, which seems like a pretty good outcome! In fact, I like them so much, I’m thinking that I’d like to use them as compositions for large, richly textured paintings or mixed media pieces.

I love their simple compositions, the limited, muted palette with pops of yellow, and the way they feel like landscapes yet they have some lovely ambiguity and unexpected lines and shapes.

I’m increasingly drawn to working more intuitively. I love the surprises that emerge out of it, especially when I create an effect that I know I would never have made up consciously.

And I love that working intuitively feels like an act of resistance to the want-to-be-in-control-and-know-the-outcome part of me that (understandably) grows stronger and louder in response to loss and trauma.

Intuitive art-making asks me to be brave and go ahead and put my precious and limited time and energy into a process of experimentation and play that might not create art I love and can sell in the end.

It asks me to be okay with mess-ups, mistakes, losses, and failures, and to not even view the art I didn’t like in the end as a failure. To instead see it as practice that’s building my art-making skills and techniques and my sense of play, curiosity, sense of humour, and confidence that I can create and have fun in the midst of uncertainty… all ways of being that I want to grow not just in how I approach my art, but also in how I approach my relationships and my life.