HELD

Humanity, Expression, Love, and Dialouge

Here's something nobody tells you about long relationships: you can love someone completely and still run out of ways to reach them. Not because anything is wrong. Because the grooves get deep. You talk about the mortgage and the kids' schedules and what to have for dinner and whether the dishwasher is actually clean or just smells clean, and at some point you realize it's been a long time since either of you said something that surprised the other person. You're not disconnected. You're just sort of running on the same track, and the track is fine, but it's the only one you've got.

HELD exists because Bill Childs and Kelly Forté figured out that creativity is the fastest way off that track.

Not therapy. Not a weekend away. Not a conversation that starts with "we need to talk." The thing that happens when two people sit down next to each other, pick up a paintbrush, and stop planning what comes next.

The evening is built around the seven energy centers in the body, what some people call the chakras. Kelly introduces each one, what it governs, where you feel it, what tends to get stuck there. Then you paint. Your own canvas, whatever comes out. There's no technique to learn and nothing to get right. While you're painting, Bill opens up the conversation between you and your partner. Sometimes the questions are funny. Sometimes they land in a place you weren't expecting. That's sort of the point. By the time you've worked through all seven, you're looking at a painting you didn't plan and you've had a conversation you couldn't have had at the kitchen table.

You leave with both canvases. Most people hang them side by side.

$175 per couple. Limited to six couples per evening. BYOB.

About the paintings

Most people say something like "I can't even draw a stick figure" within the first ten minutes. It doesn't matter. The paintings that come out of HELD look like something every single time. Each canvas ends up with seven distinct sections, one for each energy center, and what shows up is completely different for every person. The colors people choose, the images that emerge, the way one person's canvas is wild and chaotic while their partner's is spare and careful. It tells you something. Couples tend to stare at each other's work for a long time afterward, pointing things out, making connections. The conversation that starts during the evening usually keeps going in the car ride home and for days after that.

What the Evening Looks Like

Kelly prepares each canvas in advance with hand-lettered gold calligraphy. When you sit down, your canvas is already waiting with a full palette of paint and everything you need. As Kelly introduces each energy center, she talks about the color, what it holds, what it does in your body and in your life. Then the room gets quiet and everybody paints. Bill moves between couples, checking in, asking questions, sometimes just sitting with you while something works itself out on the canvas. Nobody's watching the clock. Nobody's trying to make gallery art. Some people laugh. Some people get quiet. Some people find out their partner painted the exact same thing they did, which is eerie in the best possible way.

About the facilitators: Bill Childs and Kelly Forte

Bill Childs spent close to forty years in creative leadership, from ad agencies to newsrooms to classrooms, trying to get people to stop being so afraid of their own ideas. His book Child's Play is about the thing most adults forgot somewhere between fourth grade and their first real job: that creativity isn't a skill reserved for artists. It's how we're built. Kids know this. They'll turn a refrigerator box into a spaceship without thinking twice. Adults just figure out how to break it down for recycling. Bill's argument, and it's a good one, is that getting back to that place isn't cute or nostalgic. It's necessary. Playfulness, curiosity, honesty, empathy. These aren't just nice qualities in a relationship. They're the same muscles we use when we create, and most of us haven't used them in a while.

Kelly Forté is a painter and fine artist whose work hangs in galleries and private collections, including shows at the Allentown Art Museum. But her Energy Portraits are something else entirely. She reads a person's energy and paints what she sees, part art, part intuition, part a language she's been developing for years that doesn't fit neatly into any category you'd find on a brochure. When she teaches, she's not teaching technique. She's teaching people how to get out of the way and let something come through. Which turns out to be both the hardest and most useful thing most people have ever tried with a paintbrush in their hand.

Married and residing in Easton, PA, HELD came out of doing their own version of this at the kitchen table for years and realizing that Bill's instinct for getting people to talk honestly and Kelly's ability to get people to paint honestly were doing something neither of them could do on their own. So they opened it up.