Brush away your blues

It was in 2002 that Singh set up Hue ‘n’ I though she had no professional experience as a teacher. “All I wanted to do was help people find themselves through art,” says Singh. And she started organising workshops when she came to India during her summer breaks from the US. From children to professionals,she just let them wield the brush and come out with whatever was in their hearts and minds.

“You can’t actually teach art to anybody. I believe the inspiration comes from within. As a teacher you can just familiarise them with the techniques,” says Singh.

The USP of Singh’s therapy is the way she helps people loosen up through art. “When you know that there’s nobody out there to judge you,creativity flows naturally. And the experience is also cathartic,” says Singh,whose youngest student has been a 19-month-old toddler,the oldest a 60-year-old man.

But the task has been quite an uphill one for the artist. “I realised that people didn’t like the word ‘therapy’. I used to offer free art therapy classes along with my regular art workshops and no one ever signed up for them. They would rather pay for a service that was available to them free of charge simply to avoid being labelled as souls in need of a therapy. So I decided to drop the label and secretly conduct some crazy art experiments on my students,” adds Singh.

She also roped in professionals from advertisement,theatre and filmmaking to conduct sessions with her students as she realised that some of them might find their calling through some other form of expression. Also,she put together interesting sessions where students were encouraged to paint fights,asked to create art blindfolded,encouraged to dance,meditate —- precisely do anything that would make them feel ‘childlike again’.

“Ideas such as ‘oil can’t mix with acrylic’ etc do not exist here. The artwork we create at the workshop is merely a by-product of the process of self-discovery,” sums up Singh,who is on the verge of opening a gallery that will be run by artists very soon.