Learn with Josef

For many years I taught painting and drawing at Tel Hai College of Art and in other settings, both inside and outside the artistic world. Through that experience I arrived at a conviction that the traditional academic approach — the one that begins with specific techniques and builds upward toward a finished work — is fundamentally inadequate for developing imagination, inspiration, and true creative independence.

The old method treats the parts as the path to the whole. The student learns anatomy before gesture, colour theory before feeling, perspective before vision. The result is often a technically competent painter who has lost the very thing that brought them to art in the first place.

This course reverses that process entirely.

The Tao of the Flowing Brush is built on two interlocking cycles of creativity. The first cycle — represented by the six-pointed star below — maps the essential language of visual art: Subject Matter, Tone, Form, Material, Technique, and Color. These are not steps in a sequence. They are six dimensions of a single creative act, and a painter must come to know all of them as one knows one’s own hands.

The second cycle draws on the ancient Taoist framework of Wu Xing — the five elemental forces of Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water. This cycle describes not the tools of art but the deeper rhythms of the creative process itself: how a work begins, how it develops, how it refines, and how it flows. The Wu Xing cycle only becomes accessible when the foundations of the first cycle are truly in the body — when the artist no longer has to think about technique because technique has become transparent.

At the highest level of development, the two cycles are no longer separate. They dissolve into one continuous flow — the natural movement of a mature artist who has internalized both the language and the music of their craft.