Why Art Classes are for Everyone. Period.

by Leah Kohlenberg
(Zagreb, Croatia)

Rustle, rustle. Rustle, rustle. Rustle.

This noticeable, out-of-the ordinary noise, the sound of paper being crumpled and un-folded, was gentle, but persistent background music to the art class I was teaching last June.

Ah well, I figured, the garbage can is right outside my ground floor classroom, and we had the windows open because it was hot.

I turned my attention back to the four students sitting in front of me – a determined just-turned-six-year-old; her Irish mom who takes classes with her daughter to keep up with her child’s art knowledge; a Romanian 38-year-old mother of two, who has found a latent talent in art in the past two years and wants to become a professional artist; and a Croatian journalist and interpreter, who is there to cover the art class for a story, but who at my insistence is nervously trying the lesson I’m teaching.

Why do art?

The answers are as different as the students in my classroom. More amazing (to me at least) is that all these disparate desires can fit in the same classroom, doing the same lesson.

As I walk them through drawing a simple still-life, a teapot and a vase, and then let them work on filling in the color themselves, I’m amazed at how easily they slip into the painting zone. Of course, with different students, I emphasize different elements. With Tunde, the most serious art student, I’ll suggest she show light and shadow, while young Sadhbh I emphasize putting all the elements into the painting, like making sure she draws the line that delineates where the floor and ceiling meet, for instance.


But as I help Sadhbh come up with a way to cover some extra, unwanted lines in her composition, Anika, the journalist, leans in to listen. Anika kept telling me she was “only going to watch,” and that she needed to leave in 30 minutes. She wound up staying for the entire three hours.

“I was frozen,” she admitted later. “I hadn’t drawn since I was a child, and I didn’t know if I could do it. But it wasn’t so hard.”

This is what teaching art in Zagreb is reminding me these days: that you don’t need to be an Artist, with a capital A, to do art, to benefit from art, to enjoy art. Just as there are many types of artists, there are many types of art students.

Rustle, rustle. Rustle, rustle. Rustle.

There was that noise again.

“Oh yes,” says Iseult, Sadhbh’s mom. “You had thrown some sketches away from one of the classes, and an old scruffy man, who was sifting through the garbage for bottles, was carefully opening each one and examining it quite closely. He was pulling them out and had one spread out on each garbage lid.”

And apparently, there are many types of art appreciators, too.