A Thursday Evening at Swahili Tree with “Systemic Arts with Nicole”
This Thursday at Swahili Tree in Karen will be quietly magical as an intimate group gathers around paper, brushes, and colour. No art degree needed — just curiosity, a willingness to look inward, and a splash of playfulness. And you can be part of it.
This is Therapeutic Painting with Nicole Dommasch (@systemic.arts.with.nicole) – a session that focuses on gentle self-discovery through the medium of painting. Nicole, an arts-based systemic counselor, guides participants through an experience that’s less about painting something and more about painting from something, exploring the quiet moods, emotions, and inner stories we don’t often give time or space to. Nicole will guide you through to connecting with those stories through the joyful process of expressing yourself through painting.
This workshop is open to all — no artistic skill required, just a sense of curiosity. This is about creative self-care, offering a few hours to unwind, play, and reconnect to the parts of ourselves often buried beneath responsibility and routine.
Nicole’s approach blends systemic counseling, intuitive art, and reflective conversation. This is not an art lesson or a critique of artistic skills. Nicole offers structure, warmth, and a reminder that creativity isn’t about perfection, it’s about presence. The lines, shapes, and colours you put down on paper can begin to move something inside too — a thought loosens, a feeling shifts, a new perspective appears.
For Nicole the art of emotional support is about holding space, which she does with a strong awareness of the weight that people might carry. Many of her clients are highly capable, thoughtful individuals — expatriates, mothers, professionals — who appear grounded on the outside yet feel somewhat muted within. Her work offers them a way to reconnect to themselves, not through talk alone, but through movement, colour, and flow, to regain clarity, agency, and emotional presence.
Nicole’s professional path bridges formal psychological methods with creative expression. She holds a degree in adult education, is a certified Heilpraktikerin (German holistic health practitioner), and trained as a systemic counselor with additional specialization in arts-based psychological support. She also happens to be a self-taught artist who paints for pleasure and to connect with herself.
Before working in mental health, Nicole worked for many years as a flight attendant, a role that has played a part in shaping her understanding of identity, human emotion, and the invisible task of holding emotional space for others. After becoming a mother and relocating multiple times for her husband’s career, she experienced firsthand what it means to “lose pieces of yourself while life continues to function.” This experience significantly informs her work today.
Nicole’s approach offers a clear, gentle, and respectful environment where clients can express emotions, reconnect with internal needs, and rediscover a sense of self beyond roles, responsibility, and expectations.
At Swahili Tree, the session will unfold in an arc: a moment to arrive and set intention, a period of prompted drawing and pattern-making where emotions find form on paper, and finally, a reflection on what’s shifted — both visually and emotionally. The mood will be light with joyful intention, yet can lead to profound inner openings.
Nicole uses creativity as a mirror. When we paint from our intuition, she says, something about our inner world will start to show itself.
Anyone feeling a little disconnected, creatively stuck, or even curious is invited to join!
Follow @systemic.arts.with.nicole for glimpses into her world of systemic arts — where psychology meets creativity, and the act of making becomes an act of remembering who you are.
