Across her abstract, spiritual paintings af Klint built a consistent symbolic vocabulary. Yellow signified the masculine and blue the feminine; among flowers, the rose stood for the male principle and the lily for the female^[1]. In the first painting of her Ten Largest series, for instance, the centre of an egg-like form is marked with one yellow and one blue symbol, framed above by two large circular clusters made of roses and lilies together, a deliberate combination of both signifiers within a single image^[1]. That pairing reflects af Klint's view of male and female as an intertwined life force rather than as opposing camps, a marked contrast with contemporary male artists of the period who more often treated the sexes as locked in conflict^[1].

Af Klint's colour symbolism drew on the early nineteenth-century colour theories of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, which proposed that visual perception carried traceable psychological and emotional resonance^[1]. Goethe's ideas also influenced Rudolf Steiner, the philosopher and educational theorist whose system of anthroposophy shaped much of af Klint's later spiritual thinking^[1][2]. Artists working around the turn of the twentieth century took up this pursuit of a language of colour as a way to achieve direct psycho-emotional effect without relying on narrative content, a preoccupation that fed more broadly into the move toward abstraction across several countries at once^[1].

Af Klint had practised automatic, or spirit, writing in séances since 1879, well before she turned to abstract painting^[1]. The dynamic, looping lines that curl across many of her canvases derive directly from that earlier practice, occupying an ambiguous space between script and abstract symbol. One scholar has suggested this was the route by which af Klint unlearned her formal academic training, replacing it with spontaneous, gestural communication that bypassed conscious composition altogether^[1].