The Natural Power of Intuition: Exploring the Formative Dimensions of Intuition in the Practices of Three Visual Artists and Three Business Executives

Both artists and business executives state the importance of intuition in their professional practice. Current research suggests that intuition plays a significant role in cognition, decision-making, and creativity. Intuitive perception is beneficial to management, entrepreneurship, learning, medical diagnosis, healing, spiritual growth, and overall well-being, and is furthermore, more accurate than deliberative thought under complex conditions. Accordingly, acquiring intuitive faculties seems indispensable amid present day’s fast-paced multifaceted society and growing complexity. Today, there is an overall rising interest in intuition and an existing pool of research on intuition in management, but interestingly an absence of research on intuition in the field of art. This qualitative-phenomenological study explores the experience of intuition in both professional practices in order to show comparability and extend the base of intuition, while at the same time revealing what is unique about its emergence in art practice. Data gathered from semi-structured interviews and online-journals provided the participants’ experience of intuition and are presented through individual portraits, including an introduction to their work, their worldview, and the experiences of intuition in their lives and professional practice. Framing outcomes through concepts of psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, theology, noetic sciences, quantum physics, metaphysics, and art theory, resulted in the emergence of five themes that offered perspectives on the purpose of intuition, optimum conditions for intuiting, spiritual aspects of intuition, conduits for intuitive knowledge, and suggested connections between art and intuition. The findings of the study suggest that the artists experienced heightened levels of intuition that the business executives did not. Data indicate that experiences of intuition are enhanced through methods of quieting the mind, which can be found in Eastern practices and that show similarities to processes in art practice, such as transcendence, focus, non-attachment, visualization, a body-mind-spirit connection, and intention. The findings suggest that distinct qualities of art practice allow for alternative knowledge-making methods that can create preferable conditions for intuition to flourish in art education, such as generating inclusive dialog, increasing self-awareness, processing emotions, developing focus, refining the senses, and fostering ethicality, all of which may awaken and strengthen abilities of intuition