Over the past few weeks, the spaces I use for making art have felt more like a laboratory of the psyche than workspaces. Three paintings appeared one after another, each revealing something I hadn’t realised I was carrying. I began without any intention or plan, just following sensation, tension, and movement, yet what emerged has taught me more about myself, my research, and my teaching than any deliberate intention could have.
Painting 1: The Split
The first painting began as a response to a subtle but persistent unease around my own name. I didn’t set out to explore it, but as the layers built, the image formed itself. Two figures appeared, facing each other yet unable to meet, connected by a red thread that looked at once like a wound and an umbilical cord. The field between them felt electric: intimacy and separation, attraction and defence.
White marks began to fall like rain, then tears, and eventually they transformed into teeth. That shift, from something passive to something instinctual, mirrored what the psyche does when repressed emotion finds form. The small dark form near the bottom right arrived uninvited. Dense, self-contained, it feels like a shadow-self, something pushed down, but still deeply alive and watching. It feels like the hidden part that’s always been there, waiting to be seen. It’s as if the painting has embodied the push–pull dynamic I am currently confronting: closeness, fear, protection, exposure.
In Jungian terms, this is a confrontation with the shadow which is not a storehouse of “bad” traits but the living, autonomous part of the personality that holds the energy of what has been excluded. The moment it becomes visible, transformation begins.
Painting 2: The Emergence
In the second work, the tone shifted. The colours warmed, the forms became more translucent, and a single profile began to appear. Where the first image was about tension, this one felt like conversation. The dark and light were no longer battling; they were beginning to communicate.
The linear black marks moved like neural pathways, connecting fragments of experience. The red returned, but less as bloodline and more as current, as if energy was moving again. The presence in the centre looks both human and archetypal: a mediator between worlds, half-formed, fragile, but awake.
Here the unconscious was no longer erupting; it was integrating. Jung described this stage as individuation, when the ego begins to recognise the Self as something larger than personal history. The painting itself became a map of that process with traces of chaos coexisting with order and fire held within containment.
Painting 3: The Reorganisation
The third piece carries a different vibration altogether. The earlier black mass has dispersed into movement, no longer oppressive but rhythmic, almost musical. Orange and blue cross the surface like breath and pulse. The red line, once a wound, now weaves through the composition freely.
It feels like renewal after rupture, though not in a sentimental sense. There’s still darkness, but it’s dynamic. The psyche hasn’t been “healed”; it’s been re-patterned and what was fragmented is learning how to coexist. This is what Jung meant when he wrote that the goal of life is not perfection but wholeness.
When I step back from the three together, I see the arc clearly: confrontation, conversation, integration. They trace the movement of psychic energy from unconscious eruption to conscious participation; a process that mirrors the structure of Creative Intelligence itself: Disrupt, Discern, Deliver. The first painting disrupts; the second discerns meaning; the third delivers coherence.
Response Art and the Embodied Psyche
In the midst of these, I received a message from Maria Konti, an artist, psychotherapist, and Visual Arts teacher in Greece. She had seen a photograph of my students and me painting together and wrote about something she recognised in it; the act of making alongside the people we guide.
Maria called it response art, a process used in art therapy where the therapist creates artwork either simultaneously with, or in response to, the person they accompany. Her research at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens (The Art of Response, 2023; Dwelling, 2024) shows that this kind of shared making opens a third space; something between self and other, where empathy and differentiation can coexist.
Reading her message felt like recognition, giving language to what I’ve experienced for years: that when I work beside my students, something shifts in the atmosphere. The room becomes alive with connection and curiosity: it’s not about demonstrating skill but about entering the same field of inquiry together.
The painting that prompted Maria’s letter; the one about identity, ancestry, and name, was in itself a form of response art, even though I didn’t realise it at the time. I was responding not only to my students, but to my own psyche. In Jungian terms, it was an act of active imagination: letting the unconscious speak through image.
Maria’s words illuminated something important for me: that working alongside students keeps the artist-teacher in relationship with the formative moment when the capacity to teach first took root. It reconnects us to the empathy that precedes instruction. It also establishes the necessary differentiation between teacher and student: we share the space, but we do not merge. We each hold our own image. That distance is what allows genuine connection to happen.
Art as Process, Not Product
Working in this way reinforces why I reject the language of “finished” or “resolved.” The act of making is the resolution. Art becomes a living conversation between consciousness and the unconscious and, in the classroom, between self and other.
This is why the artist-teacher model is so vital. When students see us working through our own material, staying present in the uncertainty rather than performing expertise, they witness authentic inquiry. They begin to understand that artmaking is not decoration or escape but psychological work: a method for integration, empathy, and self-knowledge.
Hillman wrote that the image is the psyche; to engage with image is to engage with soul. In a culture that prizes speed, certainty, and productivity, this is an act of resistance. We cannot cultivate creative intelligence without cultivating inner life. And we cannot teach art responsibly without acknowledging that the psyche is in the room; every time a student picks up a brush, every time they hesitate before making a mark.
The Wider Implication
Jung warned that when societies repress the unconscious, they become possessed by it. We are seeing that everywhere: projection, polarity, collective rage. If education continues to strip art of its psychological and spiritual purpose, we are training young people to live entirely in the outer world, disconnected from the inner one that gives life meaning.
To teach art as process is not to abandon rigour; it is to recognise a deeper one. It asks for honesty, reflection, and courage from teacher and student alike. It is how we learn to hold complexity without collapsing into chaos or retreating into control.
Art, in this sense, is not therapy but consciousness. It teaches us to stay human, to bring light into what would otherwise remain dark.
Closing Reflection: Creative Intelligence and the Artist-Teacher
At its heart, this is what Creative Intelligence stands for: the capacity to navigate the unknown, to discern meaning from chaos, and to act with awareness rather than reaction. It is an embodied intelligence, born through contact with the unconscious. As artist-teachers, our task is to model that intelligence, to live it through our own practice, not merely teach it through outcomes.
When we invite students to create from the inside out, to face what feels uncomfortable and stay in relationship with it, we are doing more than developing creativity. We are cultivating consciousness. And in a world increasingly dominated by surface and speed, that might be the most important education of all.
Nikki De Marco is a visual artist, IB DP Visual Arts teacher, and founder of Art-Ed Hub. Her work explores the intersection of art, psychology, and education, helping students and educators reconnect with creative intelligence through embodied inquiry.