The Artist & Intuitive Practice

Every artwork begins somewhere before explanation. A feeling. A pull. A hesitation. A sense that something belongs — or that something does not. In The Artist and Intuitive Practice, Karen Mayo explores the quieter inner processes that shape creative decisions before they can always be named. Drawing directly from her own experience as an artist and image-maker, she follows the movement from feeling to attention, discernment, trust, action and recognition — and asks what it means to learn to hear your own creative voice more clearly. Through reflections on photography, image making, automatic processes, uncertainty, craft and the recurring patterns that emerge across a body of work, the book offers artists a way to recognise intuition not as a mysterious gift, but as a relationship developed through attention and experience. The conversation eventually enters a new space: AI. In BESIDE AI — Intuition in a Generative Age, Karen opens what she calls The Conversational Room — a place where visual ideas can be articulated, questioned, resisted and understood through dialogue. AI becomes visible as another voice in the conversation, without replacing the artist, the artwork or the source from which the work begins. At its heart, this book asks a simple but important question: How do we learn to listen closely enough to recognise what is truly ours? And when the conversation is over, it returns the reader to where every artist must eventually go: back to the studio, back to the work, and back to themselves.