An Intuitive Mind By Jessica McNicol

An Intuitive Mind is veteran artist Susan Lhamo’s 6th solo exhibition, and it is aptly named. Using an instinctive process that calls the work out from the subconscious, Lhamo allows intuition to guide her, forming elegant and considered abstractions that have earnt her space in private collections, as well as garnering a number of national accolades.

From an early stage in her career, Lhamo has drawn inspiration from the abstract expressionists whose colour fields and deliberate experimentation with representation dominated the late modern and early contemporary visual landscape. Lhamo’s approach mirrors their strong reliance on colour and gesture as primary tools for a distinctly emotive language, and while these early inspirations still foreground her practice, her work is vibrant and fresh — free from the solemn rigidity of her early inspirations.

Before the work even makes it to the canvas, intuition defines it’s character. Lhamo begins by mentally interrogating the colour relationships that will ground each composition — experimenting with connections and contrasts to determine expressions of mood or influence. This is particularly obvious in Purple Dazed Noon’s Pool, where the artist admits she was interested in challenging the aversion to purple — softening its awkward intensity with pools of fresh lime and deep Phthalo blue.

Working without a preliminary design to guide her, Lhamo’s physical process also defers to her intuition. Preferring to work while standing, her process constructs layers through expressive movement and large gesture, while mid and foreground elements indicate a concentrated physicality, as Lhamo shapes her marks through subconscious response to the emerging composition.

To quote Lhamo — the painting dictates its own direction. Operating in this way, allowing the image to develop organically as she moves from large fields of colour to smaller surface gestures, Lhamo’s work unfolds as a reflectively driven meditation on compositional harmony.

Notably, works like Resilience, Forest Entanglement, and Tell Me Everything are shaped in this way, working towards confident surface details that range between raw and hard, to the softly diffuse. Rune-like, Lhamo’s foregrounding of line and symbol represents her internal connection to a larger visual consciousness. To the artist, these details are intuitively appropriated from the prehistoric signs and symbols of our neolithic ancestors. Returned to over millenia of art making, these familiar and instinctive marks anchor Lhamo’s paintings with familiarity that feels acutely personal amidst the soft energies of her gestural colour fields.

After 40 years of practice — Lhamo believes this collection, named in homage to her subconscious muse, is defined by freedom and confidence. After a long hiatus from solo exhibitions, she has returned with a tangible authenticity and a renewed approach that draws on experience, influence, and intuition.