“It was the flow of creating — without the need to have something to show for it — that helped me get back in touch with myself."
I'm Robin Cape — a facilitator in training with Intuition Painting®, a traveler, builder, musician, gardener, and lifelong learner who lost my own artbeat more than once and found it again in this work.
I've spent thirty years in Asheville in service building businesses, a family and community. I offer small, intimate workshops and retreats — spaces built to hold whatever wants to surface, without judgment, and without an agenda.
I hope one day you'll join me in the joy of connecting with your own intuition and painting from the source.
Most of us have spent our lives being productive. Responsible. Successful. And somewhere in all of that — in the busyness and the doing and the achieving — we quietly set our creative selves aside. Not forever, we told ourselves. Just for now.
I know this territory well. My own life has been full and purposeful — community work, public service, raising a family, building things that mattered. And what I discovered, over decades of that kind of living, is that when my creative self was an active part of it — when I was in a trusting, engaged relationship with my own artbeat — I was not only more effective at everything I was trying to do. I was more resilient. More flexible. More grounded. More alive.
And when I lost that connection? When my artbeat weakened and went quiet? I leaned into depression. Into a sense of futility. Into the hollow feeling of going through the motions. Asking myself who am I? Why am I?
Like any relationship worth having, our connection to our creative self has to be tended.
Playing an instrument. Dancing. Singing. Planting a garden. Raising a child with presence and wonder and unfolding curiosity. These are all ways of tending the artbeat. Of keeping it alive.
Intuition painting is one more way. A particular way — one that gathers a few people together, puts paint and paper in their hands, and invites the inner playfulness that most of us have been neglecting, to come out and share the moment. To remind us who we more fully are and what might be going on inside that we have lost touch with.
This isn’t therapy. Though it is surely therapeutic.
It’s an intentional gathering around exploring a part of ourselves that is so rarely invited to the table. And it is, in my experience, one of the most quietly powerful things a person can do.
“Every step I take is the path I make.”
I have never found the path first and then walked it. I have always walked, and let the path appear. I think that is why Intuition Painting resonates so strongly with me. Letting go of the assumption of control and being witness to what arises has been the story of my life.
I grew up in an Air Force family. We moved constantly, living in 9 different states, countries, and cultures until I left home at 18. Then I kept moving. By the time I was 30 I had lived in 26 different homes and spent a good bit of time traveling in my 1972 VW van. That rootlessness created a type of complex trauma that shaped a lot of how I saw the world, and it gave me something else: an unusual ability to meet people exactly where they are. I’ve had to do that my whole life. The only thing that kept me connected with myself was my continuous engagement with creating things. Knitting, sewing and crocheting as a kid, weaving and kitemaking as a young adult. And I found my work in the art fields, running a sign-painting company, doing calligraphy for UNC, being the graphic artist for a record company.
When I arrived in Asheville in 1988 I continued my love of creating by building things. An old house in total disrepair. An architectural salvage company. A stint on the Woodfin Waterboard as the first write in candidate to win an election in WNC in recorded history. A seat on Asheville City Council. A green schools program that spread across the state. A climate innovation center. And all the while I continued working on my education. Though it took me 43 years to get my undergraduate degree, I finished a Master’s degree right before I turned sixty. I valued the space and time that this educational path gave me to explore things deeply while still living a full life. And at the root of it all was one question: how do we find our way through?
In my forties I rediscovered my first love - music. After being totally dissuaded from playing the piano by a jaded professor in college, I walked away from what I had thought would be my path in life. But at 43 I picked up the bass guitar, began playing with multiple bands, and eventually helped found the Buckerettes. That was a creative project if I ever saw one. We wrote, we hammed, we played and I learned on stages what no classroom had ever taught me. It was never about being perfect. It was about being present. Authentic, in the moment, whole. I realized that the many years I had struggled to make my way with arts and crafts, with the business of creation, that my greatest joy resided in the doing….not the end product.
There’s more to it all of course. I have raised two kids, built several homes, learned to garden, had friends and lovers and partners and collaborators in all these journeys. I have sat with both my parents as they died, helping coach them across. I know what it means to hold space at a threshold — to trust the passage even when you cannot see the other side.
When I walked into my first Intuition Painting® session and found the practice that holds all of it together. It’s a process that doesn’t ask you to plan — only to persevere and trust what emerges. To get through to our own unfolding we have to let the path make itself one step, one brushstroke at a time.
I hope one day you’ll join me.
— Robin Cape
