Catalysing Artistic Voice Through Coaching

Articulating Intent

As a coach, when partnering with an artist, the goal is to facilitate and catalyse their ability to articulate the thoughts and intentions behind their paintings. The objective is not to interpret the art, but to guide the artist toward their own clear and compelling explanation.
Key methods include socratic questioning, which helps deconstruct the artwork and process through inquiries about color choices, feelings, texture, or the evolution of the idea. By providing a structure for the artist's narrative, and through active listening and reflection to highlight key terms and metaphors, the coach mirrors and solidifies the artist's underlying message.

Ultimately, coaching helps artists unveil their inner landscape—their often-difficult-to-articulate thoughts, emotions, and personal experiences. In this collaborative process, art becomes the language that gives form to these feelings, and storytelling becomes the bridge to meaning and perspective. This journey of reflection and articulation offers deeper insight into the personal experiences that shape their powerful work.

Link to the exhibition by Maria Dogan Petrovskaya, whose powerful work delves into the profound polarities of life – freedom and confinement, joy and suffering, light and shadow. Maria's unique journey has deeply shaped these themes, offering a compelling visual narrative. which I was privileged to author based on her own accounts.

• Personal:

  Choose a painting that you are drawn to. Imagine that this painting was a single moment in a longer journey for the artist.

  • What unresolved tension might have existed for the artist which has emerged in his/ her art?

  • What emotion has escaped onto the canvas?

  • What might have happened immediately before it?

  • If one visual component had to be removed (colour, object, brushstroke), which one would instantly make the piece lie about the experience you have imagined?

• Parenting:

  • How can an adult listen to a piece of art—not just look at it—to understand what the child is trying to communicate that their words cannot yet form?

  • How do we teach a child that the story behind the drawing is just as valuable as the drawing itself, encouraging articulation without forcing a narrative?

  • How does encouraging free artistic expression help a child develop emotional literacy and the capacity to articulate difficult internal states later in life?

• Organisation:

  • Does the art we choose for communal spaces reflect the diversity of our workforce, or does it unintentionally present a single, narrow viewpoint?

  • How can we use visual storytelling to articulate complex, cross-departmental dependencies that simple text descriptions consistently fail to convey?

  • When we use images to celebrate success, are we celebrating the final result (the finished painting) or the iterative, messy, collaborative process (the studio work) that got us there?

“Art is the daughter of freedom”

-Friedrich Schiller