Stewart Cubley & Matt Belay

Teaches at Institute for Art and Living

Stewart Cubley, Founder and Director
For over four decades, Stewart Cubley has pioneered a way of integrative and creative living through the practice of process painting. His method is one of respectful questioning, inviting you to extend yourself into new areas of thought and feeling. Stewart has the ability to meet you where you are and to ask the right question at the right time. He is a down-to-earth teacher whose personal interactions allow you to see yourself differently in ways that can be life changing. Stewart travels throughout the world, teaching his unique approach to thousands of people at personal growth centers such as the Esalen Institute and the Omega Institute. He has brought his work to multinational corporations, programs in prisons and countless other public forums.

Stewart Cubley is a coauthor of the highly acclaimed book Life, Paint & Passion: Reclaiming the Magic of Spontaneous Expression (Tarcher/Putnam). Stewart has traveled throughout the world for more than 40 years working with individuals and groups to access the potential within the human heart and imagination. He has taught his unique approach to thousands of people at learning-based organizations, corporations, monasteries, prisons, and other public forums.

He and his wife, Shae Irving, live in Fairfax, California and part of the year on their homestead near Denali Park, Alaska.

Matt Belay, Senior Facilitator
Raised on a farm in southwestern Virginia, Matt developed many skills and practical understandings at an early age. During and after university at Virgina Tech, he traveled extensively throughout the world for both work and personal study, widening his perspective of art, culture and diversity. While pursuing his degree in landscape architecture at Virginia Tech, he supported and organized many art programs and creative workshops in his community and beyond. These workshops included many of the Mountain Lake Workshops in which groups collaborated with artist such as M.C. Richards and Merce Cunningham. For a number of years, Matt worked as operations manager for Hui Ho’olana retreat center in Molokai, Hawaii, which is where he first connected with The Painting Experience. Matt now lives in his hometown of Blacksburg, Virginia, where he does all manner of construction projects on his own rural property and in the surrounding community. His primary interest is in continuing to live in a community setting and supporting his own and others’ personal growth by facilitating The Painting Experience locally and throughout the world.