There are days when I feel like I am made of paint — thick, restless, and on the verge of sliding off the canvas. The start of this school year has tested every ounce of patience and resilience I possess. Teaching in alternative education means living at the edge of order, where the structure of the day can collapse without warning. The aftershocks of COVID linger in ways that can’t be seen but are felt in every hallway and conversation. My students — many of whom came of age behind screens — are only now learning to meet the world face-to-face. They are learning to exist without the endless mediation of their phones. The new technology restrictions have gone better than expected, yet beneath that surface of compliance I sense a storm of restlessness — and within myself, a tremor of exhaustion.
That inner unease is what draws me to Karel Appel’s Personage (1957). It is not a painting that soothes. It disturbs, it vibrates, it refuses to be still. The figure within it — if it can be called a figure — is a tangle of color and gesture. Red collides with black; yellow presses against blue; white slashes through it all like a scream or a sigh. It feels alive and barely contained, much as I feel when I’m holding everything together on the outside while inside I teeter on the edge of control.
Appel, a founding member of the CoBrA movement (Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam), was painting in the aftermath of World War II, when rationalism and order had led humanity to ruin. The CoBrA artists turned away from logic and toward instinct. They painted like children, like animals — with a feral kind of honesty. They believed that art should spring from the body as much as from the mind. Personage embodies that ethos: paint becomes emotion made visible, the human psyche rendered in color and chaos.
In that way, the painting becomes a mirror for the world of alternative education. My students often arrive carrying invisible wars — trauma, loss, poverty, neglect. Their pain rarely speaks in full sentences. It emerges instead in fragments: an outburst, a refusal, a sudden silence. Like Appel’s impasto, these moments are thick and raw, layered with meanings that can’t be smoothed out. To work in this setting is to live within abstraction, to see emotion before language, gesture before logic.
Art theory tells us that abstraction isn’t the absence of meaning but the expansion of it. It invites the viewer to participate, to bring their own psyche into dialogue with the work. My students, too, are not problems to be solved but presences to be encountered. The classroom becomes a canvas — a shared space of making and remaking, of reimagining what connection looks like when trust has been shattered.
This approach aligns with the principles of art therapy, where the process of creation becomes a means of healing. The act of putting paint to canvas, or words to page or thoughts into action, is itself an assertion of agency. Edith Kramer, one of the founders of art therapy, wrote that “art itself is the therapist.” In Appel’s thick, bodily gestures, I see that truth: the movement of the hand reclaiming what trauma has stolen from the voice. Each mark is a re-entry into the world.
In trauma-informed teaching, we often say that behavior is communication. So too with Appel’s art: every brushstroke is an utterance, every color an unspoken feeling. His canvases vibrate with the same tension that fills my classroom — the friction between chaos and containment, between rage and renewal. The work reminds me that healing is not about suppressing intensity but giving it shape. To teach, in this sense, is to guide the act of expression without extinguishing it.
Appel’s contemporary, Jean Dubuffet, called this kind of art Art Brut: raw art, created outside the bounds of refinement or rule. It is an art born of necessity, of survival. When I think of my students, I see something of Dubuffet’s “raw” spirit: the art of persistence, the art of waking up and trying again. Their gestures — whether painted, spoken, or lived — are not polished, but they are true.
The American critic Harold Rosenberg once said of the Abstract Expressionists, “What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.” That idea resonates with me as a teacher. Every day in my classroom is an event — unpredictable, alive, charged with the possibility of change. Like Appel’s paint, our interactions are physical, emotional, and immediate. The goal is not to produce perfection but to remain engaged in the act of making.
When I look at Personage, I see not destruction but endurance. Beneath the chaos lies something resilient, a pulse, a will to continue. In its violent harmony, the painting speaks to the paradox of healing: that from disorder, new forms of coherence can emerge. Trauma reshapes us, but it doesn’t erase us. The brushstrokes may be wild, but they testify to the persistence of the human spirit.
At the start of this year, I felt like paint sliding off the canvas. Now, standing before Appel’s work, I recognize the drips and smears as part of the form. In art, as in teaching, meaning is not found in control but in contact. It is in the willingness to be moved by the world and to respond with our own color. Perhaps that is the truest act of creation: not the erasure of chaos, but its transformation into something that can be seen, shared, and ultimately, survived.