I came to Hilma af Klint through colour. After reading Bluets I began following a thread of curiosity about how the meaning of colour is attributed beyond aesthetics, how it holds energy and emotion, and the language it holds for people outside of standard art practices. That search led me first to the writings of Goethe, Kandinsky, Pastoureau and then to Hilma, whose paintings seemed to breathe with a life of their own. Her colours did not describe objects; they transmitted states of being. They felt less like choices and more like frequencies.

Hilma did not paint to impress the world around her; she painted in service to a world still waiting to be born. Between 1906 and 1915 she created nearly two hundred vast, luminous works that she called ‘Paintings for the Temple’. Spirals, circles and shells drift across fields of colour that seem to move between matter and light. She said these paintings were guided by beings she and a small group of women called The High Masters. In her journals she wrote that they were “painted directly through me, without any preliminary drawings, and with great force.” What she practised was not expression but transmission, a form of divine creativity where the artist becomes an instrument for revelation.

Hilma treated her studio as a sanctuary and her materials as ritual tools. Each colour carried intention: blue for spirit, yellow for matter, pink for love, white for unity. Theosophy and later anthroposophy shaped her philosophy, blending science and mysticism in a search for the unseen laws that govern visible life. Having studied botany she recognised the same sacred geometry within nature that she found in her visions. Her paintings were not decorative experiments but diagrams of creation and attempts to translate vibration into form.

The Ten Largest, a monumental series charting the stages of life from childhood to old age, she painted growth as a living rhythm of spirals, flowers and letters that seem to pulse with energy. These were not illustrations of human development but meditations on the soul’s unfolding. In other series such as The Swan and The Dove she explored the reconciliation of opposites, the eternal dance of light and shadow, masculine and feminine, spirit and matter. Through colour and movement she expressed the truth that all dualities are temporary gestures within a larger unity.

Hilma believed that art could prepare consciousness for evolution. She imagined her Paintings for the Temple housed in a spiral building where visitors would ascend floor by floor, each painting a step toward awakening. The physical structure was never built but the metaphor endures. To create is to build a temple within, to craft a space where the invisible can be made visible.

I find it fascinating that Hilma chose to keep her abstract work hidden until long after her death. This decision shows her faith in both the work and the unfolding of time. She believed that the world was not yet ready to understand what she had created, and that a future generation, perhaps twenty years later, would be able to see it with new eyes. Rather than force it into a world that could not yet receive it, she allowed the work to wait. There is something deeply moving in that kind of trust, the willingness to serve a vision that might never be witnessed in your own lifetime.

I find it fascinating that Hilma chose to keep her abstract work hidden until long after her death. This decision shows her faith in both the work and the unfolding of time. She believed that the world was not yet ready to understand what she had created, and that a future generation, perhaps twenty years later, would be able to see it with new eyes. Rather than force it into a world that could not yet receive it, she allowed the work to wait. There is something deeply moving in that kind of trust, the willingness to serve a vision that might never be witnessed in your own lifetime.

It takes courage to make something that may not belong to your time. It asks for a kind of faith that measures value not through recognition but through integrity. Hilma believed that the right eyes would come when the world was ready, and that belief feels almost radical now, when creativity is so often tied to speed, exposure and reward.

Her choice reminds us that divine creativity is not about control but relationship. It is an act of listening, a slow collaboration with something larger than the self. The artist’s work is not always to invent but to attune, to meet what wants to move through us with steadiness and care. When we create from that place we participate in a conversation with the greater intelligence that shapes all things. Making becomes a kind of prayer, not a demand for outcome but an offering of attention.

Creativity, at its best, is a conversation with the unseen. It asks for receptivity as much as intention, and it unfolds through rhythm, patience and faith. This spread is designed to help you enter that conversation with clarity. It can be used whenever you feel blocked, uncertain or simply curious about what wants to move through you next.

Approach it as Hilma might have approached her work, not as a demand for answers but as an act of listening. Let each card speak to a stage in the creative flow: the source that inspires you, the vessel you become, the form that emerges and the way you ground it in your life. Use it before beginning a new project, when a vision feels distant, or whenever you need to trtust that creation itself is collaboration.

Spread created by Jessica Hart of Little Rituals inspired by Hilma af Klint. Please credit if shared or adapted.

To stand before Hilma’s paintings is to feel both humbled and expanded, aware of the intelligence within colour and the patience within form. She painted for the future and we, standing in that future, become her witnesses. Her work reminds us that art, like spirit, asks for courage, the courage to listen, to translate and to let something greater move through our hands.