Every Wednesday, as I step across the office threshold, I feel as though I am entering a space-time where words are barely whispers. It is a place where gestures and colors take on the role of mediators. In this space, surrounded by children who may never share a spoken language with me, I discover that, despite everything, we speak a common tongue as ancient as the sun: the language of the visual. A language that needs no conventions, whose meaning is immediate and universal, because at its core lies emotion—the ability to communicate what words fail to convey, yet which emerges truthfully in form and color.
These classes are not merely a process of learning. They are an act of liberation. I do not ask them to follow orthodoxy or conform to external expectations. I invite them to feel, to let their hands find their own path. Like rivers seeking their course, free from the fear of error. And then, magic happens. For years, I have taught the intricacies of my craft. At first, I believed teaching painting was about imparting tools: how to handle a brush, balance light and shadow, organize colors on a palette. In short, how to shape an idea into an image. But over time, I realized that teaching art is, at its heart, about opening the door to an unexpected journey.
For these children, art is a crack in the wall—a breach in days defined by scarcity and rigidity. Here, they are allowed what is denied to them in other spaces: the freedom to err, to doubt, or to dare to imagine the “unattainable.” When I watch them create, I reflect on how deeply subversive the act of creation can be in a context of exclusion. There is a raw truth in the colors they choose, in the lines they draw without fear of tearing the paper. Each smudge, each scribble, is an act of defiance. A declaration: “I am here,” rejecting the labels the world has imposed on them. It is as if, in giving them this space, they are finally allowed to exist beyond the margins, outside the narrative’s others have written for them.
This process is also a mirror. There are days when, looking at what they create, I see in them a courage I envy. Because they do not paint to please or to meet standards. They paint to express.
I think of so many women artists throughout history—Rosa Bonheur, Agnes Martin, or Remedios Varó—who found in painting both a refuge and a force to exist beyond the limitations of their gender. Their works did not seek comfort or complacency; they sought truths that unsettle, that strike, but that endure, irreducible. That same truth lives in my students’ work: a girl tracing the outline of her hand, filling it with fractured lines; a boy drawing a pink tree.
Painting confronts us with uncertainty, but it also allows us to touch the essential: to recognize ourselves as alive and free. It is in this act—in the initial chaos of colors finding their shape, in the purposeless line that ends up revealing a world—that we find a lesson of profound significance. Learning to create is learning to remain in constant motion, even when the world wants us to stand still.
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