The Art of Teaching and Not Teaching
I recently started reading Oil Painting Techniques and Materials by Harold Speed, an early twentieth-century painter and educator. The book begins with this wonderfully strange line:
“There are two ways of teaching art, one is to teach and the other is not to teach.”
Admittedly, that sounds like something an old British painter might say just before disappearing behind a cloud of pipe smoke.
But beneath it is a serious question:
What part of becoming an artist can actually be taught?
To teach means training the artist through disciplined study: drawing, observation, composition, color, materials, and technique.
To not teach means resisting too much instruction and trusting that the artist’s intuition will find its own necessary expression.
There’s something valuable in both approaches. But either one, taken too far, can hold an artist back.
Too much emphasis on technique can produce an artist who knows how to make an impressive painting but no longer knows why they are making it. Too little can leave someone with a world inside them and no reliable means to bring it forth.
To Teach
Generally, we assume teaching is a good thing.
I mean, isn’t that what we’re paying for in formal education? It would be a little unsettling to hand over your tuition money only to have the professor shrug and say, “The answers were inside you all along.”
When we seek instruction, we expect someone to instruct us.
We want to know how to draw a convincing picture, mix the right colors, organiz a composition, control an edge, prepare a surface, or keep a painting from becoming a swamp of muddy regrets.
These things matter.
An artist can have a powerful idea and still make a weak painting. Good intentions cannot correct inaccurate values. Strong emotions do not automatically create strong compositions. Being deeply moved by the human condition will not, unfortunately, teach you how to paint a hand.
Those skills are learned through observation, repetition, correction, failure, and practice.
Training gives the artist a language. It develops the coordination between the eye, mind, and hand. It teaches us to recognize relationships that we might otherwise miss. We begin to see that a color is not simply “blue,” but a particular blue changed by every color surrounding it. We learn that drawing is less about naming objects and more about noticing angles, proportions, rhythms, and intervals.
Technique gives us a toolbox for solving visual problems. Instead of merely hoping something interesting happens, we become more equipped to recognize what is happening and respond deliberately.
But there is also a danger.
Technical skills can become so consuming that the artist begins to mistake control for vision. The pursuit of proficiency can gradually replace the original desire to communicate, explore, or encounter something unknown.
The painting may be beautifully rendered. Every edge may be handled with confidence. The surface may provide undeniable evidence that the artist knows exactly what they are doing.
And yet, somehow, nothing is happening.
The work demonstrates ability without revealing much of the person behind it.
This is the danger Speed saw in overtraining: an artist can become so focused on the machinery of making art that they become more mechanic than artist. The work may be technically correct, but it can also become formulaic and stale, a polished version of what has already happened a thousand times before.
They learn how a good painting is supposed to look, but lose touch with the humanity of personal expression.
Yes, technique is essential. But technique alone can only produce a technically proficient painting.
It cannot tell us why the painting needs to exist.
To Not Teach
Speed’s second form of teaching is not to teach, which frankly, sounds like a pretty good gig.
Imagine getting paid to walk into a studio, look thoughtfully at a student’s painting, and say, “You must discover that for yourself.”
Then nod and slowly leave for lunch.
Absurd as it sounds, there is wisdom in it.
Not everything an artist needs can be delivered through instruction. At some point, the teacher must stop talking long enough for the student to hear something within themselves. As Robert Henri (another early century painter) wrote, “All education is self-education.” Ultimately, the artist must learn to become their own teacher.
Every artist possesses a particular way of noticing the world. We are drawn toward different subjects, colors, tensions, symbols, and visual relationships. Certain images follow us for reasons we may not understand.
These intuitive movements are often subtle. They can easily be drowned out by rules, expectations, trends, and the desire to please an audience.
A good teacher must therefore know when not to interfere.
Sometimes the artist needs an answer. Sometimes they need the space to remain inside the question.
Self-discovery cannot be assigned as homework. It happens through experimentation, mistakes, curiosity, and the gradual recognition of patterns within our own work (and life). We try something. We respond to it. We notice what feels alive and what feels contrived. Over time, we begin to distinguish between the choices we make because they are expected and the choices that actually belong to us.
But this approach too, has its own danger.
All of us have heard some version of “There are no rules in art” or “Just express yourself.” These ideas can feel wonderfully freeing, right up until you are alone in front of a canvas with absolutely no idea how to make the paint do what you want.
Freedom without ability eventually becomes another kind of limitation.
An artist may be overflowing with emotion, imagination, and ideas but lack the practical means to give them convincing form. The experience inside them remains far more powerful than the work they are able to produce.
Intuition may provide the spark, but a spark still needs something capable of catching the flame.
My Own Path
I began learning to paint by studying the work of my mentor, Ron Mazellan.
Ron was (and remains) an exceptional artist and an inspirational person. I learned his process, studied his decisions, and tried very hard to paint exactly like him. He was kind enough to let me rip him off and briefly pretend the results were my own.
And honestly, I needed that.
Emulation gave me a path when I didn’t yet know how to make one. I could follow his decisions and begin to understand why they worked. Through imitation, I learned about composition, materials, and the physical process of bringing an illustration from beginning to end.
We sometimes speak about originality as though the authentic artist emerges fully formed, possessing a personal style untouched by outside influence.
That has not been my experience.
Most of us learn by stealing, borrowing and adapting existing ideas. We study someone whose work opens a door for us, and then we walk through it. We learn their language before we understand our own. Every artist begins inside a lineage of teachers, influences, traditions, and discoveries made by other people.
There is no shame in that.
But somewhere along the line I realized I couldn't emulate forever without becoming a second-rate version of Ron’s truth.
His way of seeing grew from his life, his temperament, his questions, and his encounters with the world. I could learn from the path his work took, but I could not borrow the source from which those forms came.
Eventually, every artist has to leave the safety of gimmicks, formulas, and even their mentors' instruction.
My formal training was both valuable and necessary. It strengthened my ability to observe and gave me practical ways to solve problems that passion alone could not. But over time, my own unique artistic handwriting began to appear through the knowledge of painting I learned .
The ideas and stories within the work gradually became more important than the allure of impressing others with technical mastery.
I wasn’t abandoning my training, I simply traveled full circle back to an original impulse that cannot be manufactured.
The Painted Path Approach
Speed believed that instruction could develop an artist’s powers of observation and draftmanship, but it could not manufacture the deeper intuitive source of art.
On this, I agree.
I cannot teach another person what to love, what to notice, or what their life has prepared them to see. I cannot hand someone a personal vision or manufacture authentic expression through a five-step painting demonstration.
But this does not mean intuition is fixed.
Speed himself suggests that the subconscious imagination can be fed by close attention to art and nature. The original impulse may not be something a teacher can install, but it can be nourished, neglected, encouraged, or buried beneath the pressure to make art the “right” way.
This is where I would take his idea one step further.
I believe some form of artistic instinct belongs to all of us. It may be more accessible for some people than others. It may have gone dim after years of comparison, criticism, or disuse. But the desire to shape experience, create meaning, and respond to beauty is not reserved for a talanted few.
I don’t agree with everything Speed writes. Some of his language, particularly his treatment of what he calls “primitive art,” reflects the cultural hierarchies of his time. I am less interested in deciding which traditions represent the highest form of art than in helping people recognize the creative intelligence already moving within them.
That intelligence still needs tools.
Artists deserve serious instruction in drawing, value, color, composition, materials, and the physical behavior of paint. If a technical problem is preventing the work from succeeding, encouragement alone is not enough.
Sometimes a student does not need a lecture in subjectivity.
Sometimes they just need someone to explain where that dang vanishing point is.
But technical instruction should serve the artist who is emerging. It should not turn them into a copy of the teacher or make them feel that tradition is a gate through which only a select few may pass.
To teach art well is to move continually between instruction and restraint. It means knowing when to offer an answer, and when an answer would interrupt a more important discovery.
Speed’s is right to point out that these two approaches are not opposing philosophies. They are two responsibilities held by the same teacher.
The goal is to strengthen an artist’s hand without asking them to surrender their soul. It is to give them enough skill to make purposeful choices and enough freedom to discover choices they never expected to make.
Most importantly, good guidance should gradually make artists less dependent upon the teacher and more trustworthy to themselves, even when an artist is nudged past the conventions of their time.
I believe strongly that the purpose of art is not solely to create painting.
The purpose of art is to create artists.
For You, the Artist
If you are learning by emulating artists you admire, that does not mean you are unoriginal.
You are gathering a vocabulary.
Study their work. Follow their process. Notice how they solve problems. Borrow what helps you. Let their knowledge shorten the distance between what you imagine and what you can make.
But remember: their path is not your destination.
Learn to be a good student. Welcome guidance from people you trust. Accept the criticism that helps you grow. But never become so dependent on outside voices that you stop listening to the quieter source within you.
When we create only through the conscious, analytical mind, we can lose contact with the deeper movements of intuition and imagination. Some of art’s greatest discoveries come from that hidden place, the part of us that recognizes something before we can explain it.
Learning to trust that source is not a rejection of your education. It may be the moment your education truly becomes your own.
Learn the rules, but do not let the rules do all your seeing for you.
Practice deliberately, but leave room for surprise.
Think carefully, but do not assume the conscious mind is the only part of you capable of thought.
Develop your technique, but remember that technique is not the destination. It is the means by which something inward becomes visible.
The artist’s path runs between imitation and originality, thought and intuition, discipline and freedom, the conscious and the subconscious.
You will probably lean too far in one direction and then the other.
We all do.
Sometimes you will need more instruction. At other times, you will need to stop collecting answers and spend enough time with your own work to hear what it has been trying to tell you.
Seek teachers who understand the difference.
Then keep learning until your skill no longer hides your voice, but carries it.
Because the purpose of artistic training is not to teach you to make work like someone else.
It is to help you bring forth the work that could only come from you.
If you’re looking for guidance that strengthens your skills without replacing your voice, learn more about one-on-one mentoring through The Painted Path Studio.
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