Portuguese Tile Painting Workshop: Honoring Memories Through Art in Porto

The tile starts blank. A soft unglazed cream, and heavier in the hand than it looks.

Then a sheet of tracing paper goes over the top, and the afternoon starts to make sense.

This was Porto, day two of the very first Grief Trip, in 2024. Seven women. A morning through Ribeira and the market and the tiled walls of São Bento station, then a short walk up to Rua Chã, to Boiler Studio, where Daniela runs a Portuguese tile painting workshop.

None of us were there for the tiles. We were there because our people died.

What it costs to keep something

"Portuguese tiles are very different," Daniela said, holding up a panel of the real thing. Dozens of patterns pressed together, blue and yellow and green, some of them centuries old.

Azulejos. They cover churches, shopfronts, whole train stations. They were never decoration only. They were how this country kept its records.

Then she told us what it takes to keep them. Not the history, the upkeep. What preserving a tradition actually costs in effort and money now, today, when nobody is obliged to bother.

We do the same thing with our families. The recipe nobody else makes anymore. The place you go every year. The things we decide to carry on after someone dies, and what carrying them on asks of us.

There is no right answer to that one. Only what fits the life you are actually in.

A colour for each memory

The workshop itself is simple enough. You trace the design onto the tile, the outline comes through in a thin rust-coloured line, and then you choose your colours. "We have a main colour," Daniela said. One that leads, and the rest arranged around it.

We gave it a grief twist.

Each person could dedicate a colour to a memory of their person. Then, painting in that colour, spend those minutes inside that memory. Nothing said out loud, nothing explained to anybody.

Here is why we do it that way.

In grief it is easy to spend most of your attention on how they died and on what is gone. That part takes up an enormous amount of room, without being invited. Deliberately remembering how they lived puts something back on the other side.

Grief is everything we carry because of the loss. Not only the ending. And some of what we carry, we get to choose.

I did not really do it

I had my colours picked. And then somewhere in the middle I stopped thinking about memories at all, and started thinking about the brush, and the edge of the petal, and whether the green had gone too green.

My mind went quiet. It was a rest.

It is the adult colouring book thing, and I understood it properly for the first time sitting there. Attention has to go somewhere. Hand it something small and repetitive and it lets go of whatever it was gripping.

I have been thinking since about building that in on purpose. Not as grief work particularly. Just as a break, from grief and from everything else that asks for me.

Where they went

There was a lot of laughing that afternoon. That is the part people never expect about a grief retreat.

And then long stretches with no talking in them at all.

Everyone finished. Tulips. A sunflower on a blue ground. A blue bird mid-flight with a yellow branch under it. A rosette in red and green that was nobody's idea of correct and much better for it.

Most people took theirs home. Some are on a kitchen windowsill. Some went on a shelf, propped up near a photograph. Some are in a drawer, which is also a way of keeping something.

We only had the one afternoon. The tiles will still be here in fifty years.

Boiler Studio still runs this workshop, and you can book it yourself: Tile Painting and Cocktails in Downtown Porto. That is an affiliate link, so we may earn a small commission if you book through it. You can also book direct at boilerstudio.com.