A Painting Workshop for Teachers – Not What You'd Expect

A few days ago I led a Freestyle painting workshop for 40 teachers from central Israel.

I thought the challenge would be logistics – enough space to work, materials spread out so no one would crowd around, and how I'd even be heard over 40 people.

But the real challenge was somewhere else entirely.

I invite people to paint abstractly. Not because abstract painting is somehow more "right," but because when there's no need to produce something you could later name, it's easier for most of us to let go of self-criticism, of planning, of the need to "succeed."

At the end of the workshop, we didn't look at the paintings together. I was much more interested in hearing about the process.

Some people described how they started with one thing, changed direction, changed again, and suddenly found themselves somewhere they never would have reached if they'd planned ahead. For some, it was their first time working with acrylics or on canvas. And one teacher said he usually avoids yellow and black – which happened, or didn't happen, to be the only two colors I'd put out that day (plus white, of course). He smiled and said he was surprised how much he enjoyed the very colors he always avoided.

But there was one response that stayed with me.

During the workshop I went over to a teacher who still hadn't started on her canvas. I gently asked if she wanted to begin. She looked at me and said she actually wanted to paint something she could

name afterward – and that she felt I kept talking about letting go, but wasn't actually letting her go.

A punch in the gut.

I remember well how, early in my own path, a painting teacher insisted on teaching me how to look at a still life and abstract it. She did it out of enthusiasm and good intention, but for three months afterward I couldn't paint at all. That's the last thing I'd ever want to cause someone else.

I thanked her for her honesty. I explained that if my suggestion turns into one more rule weighing her down, we've missed the whole point. I told her to paint exactly what she wanted.

Toward the end of the workshop, I passed by her again. She was working beside the school principal. Afterward she told me she'd chosen to sit next to him not to copy him, but to absorb a bit of his energy – an energy of flow.

She showed me her painting. It was completely abstract. Like a glowing source of light. She smiled and said a colleague who knows her well told her: "That's so you".

There was a teacher who said, in the closing circle, that painting really isn't her thing. That she couldn't say a new world had opened up for her. But that she'd tried something she'd never done before – and that, in itself, felt important to her.

To me too.

And there was another participant who, at the start of the workshop, refused to even pick up the sketchbook. "Nonsense", she muttered.

By the end, when she saw what was happening around the tables, she came up to me quietly and asked if there was another canvas left...