Teaching as Alchemy: How the Classroom Becomes a Laboratory for the Soul

Teaching, at its highest form, is not about instruction — it’s about transformation. Over the years, I’ve come to see the classroom not as a space of hierarchy, but as a living organism, a kind of alchemical vessel where creative energies circulate, mix, and transmute.

Every semester begins like the start of a new experiment: the students bring their raw materials — curiosity, fear, talent, resistance — and I bring my own, shaped by years of failures, discoveries, and restless inquiry. Together, we light the flame. What emerges isn’t predictable; it’s alive.

My teaching has always been circular in nature. What I offer my students inevitably returns to me in unexpected forms — a color they use that reawakens something in my own work, a question they ask that dissolves an old assumption. The classroom becomes a feedback loop, a kind of sacred mirror. I don’t teach from mastery; I teach from participation. The process itself is the curriculum.

Each project we undertake is a microcosm of this larger cycle. The student begins in confusion — the nigredo, as the alchemists would say — that dark stage of uncertainty before clarity emerges. Through engagement, through doing, the material begins to shimmer with meaning. By critique, by dialogue, we refine it further. And at the end, something has changed — not just in the work, but in the maker.

When I return to my own studio, that same cycle unfolds again. The echoes of the classroom — the laughter, the frustration, the breakthroughs — become a kind of hum beneath the brushstrokes. I often realize, mid-painting, that a lesson I gave was never meant for my students at all. It was for me.

To teach is to remember that we are all unfinished. To create is to honor that fact. And somewhere between those two truths lies the art of becoming — the alchemy that turns teaching into transformation, and transformation into art.