How to Build a Personal Symbol Language in Your Work

In this episode I’m exploring how to build your own personal symbol language as an abstract landscape artist.

I’m not talking about obvious icons or literal symbols - but the intuitive marks and gestures that show up again and again in your work. Those quiet shapes that seem to belong to you, even if you’ve never named them.

I share how I’ve started noticing the repeated movements in my own work - the circular blending with my palette knife, the half buried scratches, and the soft vs. sharp contrast from my catalyst wedge. Over time, these gestures have started to feel like a kind of personal visual dialect.

In this episode I walk you through how to begin observing your own recurring marks and how to intentionally build on them - not to restrict your freedom, but to deepen your connection with your work.

What I Talk About

• What a personal symbol language actually is (and what it’s not)

• The quiet power of repetition and instinctive mark-making

• Why certain gestures start to feel like “yours”

• How to notice the marks and shapes that keep returning

• The beauty of letting your own visual language evolve organically

Listen to the episode here.

This Week’s Creative Invitation

1️⃣ Pull out 6–10 of your recent paintings or sketches and look for repeated gestures, marks, or shapes.

2️⃣ Start a symbol journal  where you record and experiment with the marks that feel like yours.

3️⃣ Choose one of those marks and bring it into your next painting on purpose. See how it behaves when you let it lead the composition.

4️⃣ If you’re inside my Abstract Horizons membership, I’d love for you to share an image of one of your pieces and tell us about a symbol or mark that keeps surfacing in your work. What might it represent for you?