“Every genuine artistic intuition goes beyond what the senses perceive and, reaching beneath reality's surface, strives to interpret its hidden mystery...”
- Pope John Paul II, Letter to Artists.

An Artist's Intuition presents a new series of "Spinners" by artist Portia Mortensen, marking a significant evolution in the artist's practice. Expanding upon her exploration of visual perception, these works reveal a growing sophistication in both technique and conceptual depth. While each painting remains physically still, it resists visual fixity, inviting viewers to move through space as shifting angles of light activate iridescent surfaces and layered textures. The accompanying videos extend this experience into the digital exhibition, emphasizing that the works unfold through interaction rather than passive observation.

Throughout the series, Mortensen draws inspiration from the legacy of the Old Masters, engaging in their pursuit of technical mastery while holding that artistic creation can reveal truths beyond the visible world. Rather than quoting historical imagery directly, she distills its emotional and spiritual resonance into abstraction. In Touch (2026), acrylic on canvas, Mortensen references Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam, reimagining its iconic near-contact through two spinner forms suspended just short of meeting. Echoes of the fresco emerge through a restrained palette of blues, whites, and warm neutrals accented with gold. At the same time, the composition transforms a familiar Renaissance image into a meditation on anticipation, connection, and transcendence.

Mortensen's work is guided not by representation alone but by intuition: the capacity to translate an interior vision into form through color, composition, and texture. Layer upon layer, the paintings balance precision with spontaneity, creating compositions that appear to shift and breathe as the viewer's perspective changes. Movement becomes both a formal device and a metaphor for perception itself, suggesting that meaning is never fixed but continually revealed through sustained looking.

At the heart of the Spinners is an exploration of duality. As Mortensen explains, "At their core, the spinners represent the duality of life. There is no dark without light, love without grief, hope without despair, hot without cold, drought without flood." Rather than positioning these forces as opposites in conflict, the works present them as mutually dependent conditions of existence. Through motion, reflection, and abstraction, An Artist's Intuition invites viewers to consider beauty not as certainty, but as a dynamic experience emerging from the continual interplay of contrast, balance, and transformation.

--Curated by Phoebe Caswell