Learn with Josef

For many years I taught painting and drawing in different Art institutions , like Avni Institute of Art in Tel Aviv, Musrara School of Art in Jerusalem, Tel Chai Institute of Art in Upper Galilee   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.

The Tao of the Flowing Brush course, reverses that process entirely — starting from the whole, in keeping with the basic Gestalt principle that the whole precedes, and is larger than, the sum of its parts.

There are two cycles of the creative process. One is a general cycle, concerned with the natural cycles of everything in life.
The most commonly known is the cycle of Birth-Childhood-Maturity-Old Age and finally Death.
Another example is the Falling in Love , where two people, find each other attractive, start a courtship procedure, fall in love, decide to be together and maybe get into bringing a child into the World.
There are many other cycles from our everyday life, but right now it is enough to make the point that we already very familiar with cycles of creativity in a most intimate way. 

The Tao of the Flowing Brush is built on these two interlocking cycles. The first — the general cycle — draws on the ancient Taoist framework of Wu Xing. The second — the specific cycle — is mapped by the six-pointed star: Subject Matter, Tone, Form, Material, Technique, and Color, the essential language of visual art.

I believe this course offers a unique way to combine the two, so that their interaction creates a natural flow between the study of the timeless principles of the craft and the excitement of creating real art — right from a beginner’s very first steps, without compromising their unique vision.