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“You ought to have a mother-daughter art class.”

This idea was casually tossed out by one of my students and favorite people in Zagreb, Tina Odinsky Vec, as she left an art class a week ago. Tina’s nine-year-old daughter, Josie, had joined us for the class and enjoyed it. (Tina, an American who has lived in Zagreb for 13 years, is a wealth of information about the city and is full of good ideas like this. Her friends say they pop out of her like popcorn).

This idea had immediate appeal to me. It was easy, and felt intuitively right. I put it out to my students – many of whom are mothers – and it appealed to them too, and the classes quickly filled. But there was something more to this idea that I liked – the invocation of the feminine.

I’ve been looking for a way to take the hard edges off of doing art. Sure, we need to practice daily and work hard, struggling to master technique. In this struggle some amazing transformations happen. I push my students in my art classes to embrace this discomfort, as I’ve taught myself to do it.

But exploring individual voice works in the exact opposite way. You can’t force it. You have to sit quietly and listen to it. It flows easily, you don’t push it. The concepts pop up gently – in a drawing, a doodle, or a song lyric, or a pattern in a series of photographs. If you reject them (and who hasn’t said “This is a stupid idea, I know” about their own thoughts), my friend Linda Waterfall, a musician and painter, says “they are fragile, and like a groundhog, will go back underground and hide.”

If the discipline of trying to master drawing and painting is masculine energy, I’d like to think that the exploration of voice is feminine energy. All men and women have and need both traits, but in this world, the masculine is often credited over the feminine. We drive ourselves and those around to us work harder, stronger, better. I myself, as an artist who started in the field late, definitely have done the same: pushing myself to work in the studio for many hours, and work on the side to support my work in the studio. We credit mastery of technique, success in the external world, popularity more than the goofy idea that comes to us suddenly and easily. Let’s face it: intuitive isn’t always as “cool,” as my friend Carrie Allen, a former journalist, novelist and artist, often says.

In a regular brainstorming session Carrie and I do together to support each other in our work and our lives, she walked me through setting my intent: to create the divine feminine all my classes (Carrie recently re-posted our conversation in her blog as an example of how others can set intent in their work, read it here if you are interested in this subject).

Mother-Daughter reminded me of feminine (once again, not applying “feminine” only to women, but to everyone).  Truly, what more important job is there than mothering, and how little it it valued? Wanting to appreciate and invoke the divine feminine in myself, I aimed to create it in my classroom. We concentrated on each other – each student drew their mother’s face, their daughter’s face, or their own face.  Though faces are hard, the point was not to master them, but to learn a couple of things, and try them, and spend some time with our mothers.  When you are watching a five-year-old draw her mother’s face, you don’t expect perfection, nor does she. You are, in fact, rather curious to see what comes out. Check out the slideshow above to see for yourself.

We had a great deal of fun! Besides drawing, mothers got free gift bags, my friend Katarina Rošić, a professional massage therapist, gave free shiatsu massages, and we had nice cakes to eat. We had a total of five mothers, six daughters, one grandma and one granddaughter, ranging in age from 5 to 76, and including five nationalities. Though I scheduled the classes for two hours because I thought the children wouldn’t be able to last longer, everyone was so engaged that both classes went past three hours.

Another outcome: next Saturday will mark the start of a weekly children’s art atelier class! Check out artistholidays.wordpress.com for more details, or e-mail me at leah.kohlenberg@gmail.com if you are interested!

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