Until now, Jean Roulet and his fellow sculptors have been having their weekly catchup over an apéritif. “We’ve got three hours of hard work ahead of us. We need to get our strength up,” Roulet tells me, taking some bread out of the oven. The atmosphere is lively as about a dozen men and women chat away in French and Dutch, some talking about their projects, others about the week’s events. Nothing to worry about here, then.

Until the life model arrives. I’m expected to turn a slab of clay into something resembling (or at least inspired by) a naked woman in the middle of the room.

The pottery sessions are just one activity offered by Roulet at his studios in the Brussels commune of Schaarbeek. Across the road from the pottery studio is an artist studio-house with a beautiful sgraffito façade. Roulet bought it about two decades ago and holds drawing classes there.

But I am here for the pottery evening, and, before I know it, I’m wearing a white overall, standing in front a block of clay and wondering how to avoid making a complete fool of myself. “Just cut off a piece of the clay, spread it out as if you’re buttering a sandwich, and then start to mould it into the shape of, say, a back,” Roulet says, trying to convince me that I, too, have a creative spirit. I smile nervously. “Have a go. Everyone can create something,” he says with a straight face.

I focus on the legs. The model is standing with one leg gently bent, one foot slightly behind the other. I try to create the same effect with my clay. Unfortunately the lower leg falls off. Just as I start thinking “This is never going to work; I’ll just quickly cobble something together and slip off home,” Roulet comes round and says: “Good, good. Try and make three or four of those, and then we can combine them.” Three or four little figurines struggling to hold onto their legs. Great.

The others in the group seem to be lost in their own worlds, with the lively chatter of earlier on now replaced by almost total silence. Every now and again, someone asks if they can spin the large table, on which the model is standing, around a few degrees (the response is usually a few nods and mutters), and then the studio returns to being a space of studied concentration.

“I love having the model there,” Roulet tells me later. “Everyone is in the moment, in their own universe, creating their sculptures. You lose yourself.”

It takes some getting used to. You may not be the one who has to take off your clothes, but there is something quite intimate about being in an almost silent space, with a life model in the centre of the studio, and being asked to express yourself through the medium of clay. The artists put a lot of themselves and their emotions into their creations, and I’m not surprised when one of the group (Françoise) tells me that there are sometimes tears as people become disheartened or a sculpture collapses.

One of the other artists (Cathy) confides that she often feels as if her sculptures are coming to life in front of her eyes, as if the elasticity of the clay were living skin, and she has minimal control over the form that it takes. “It’s like a mystery,” she says, adding that she would spend all day and night in the studio if she didn’t have to look after her grandchildren.

The weekly sessions aren’t classes in the strict sense of the word. Roulet describes the as an opportunity for people to come together and explore their creativity. “Art is our toolbox. It allows us to get to know ourselves better in order to better understand the world around us.”

By the end of the evening, I wasn’t sure that I understood the world around me any better, but I did have four clay figures, one (unintentionally) larger than the others, that Roulet helped me to join together into a single block. I wasn’t convinced that it was worth saving, but Roulet said he would fire it, and I could pass by again to pick it up and maybe add a bit of colour.

Whether or not I have the courage to do that remains to be seen.

The 100-year studio

The house at Voglerstraat 17 in Schaarbeek was built at the start of the 20th century for the painter Alfred Ruytinx and has since retained its function as an artists’ studio.

One of the most striking features of this listed building is the sgraffito mural on the facade, created in 1906 by Henri Privat-Livemont, a Belgian artist best-known for his Art Nouveau poster designs. The fresco is thought to depict the artist Yvonne Vonnot-Viollet, who later lived in the house.

By 1989, when the artist Jean Roulet decided to buy the house, the mural was in urgent need of restoration. And that’s exactly what he set about doing. Today, Roulet uses the downstairs for drawing classes, while the upstairs studio is packed with his sketches, drawings and paintings. Across the road, he rents more studio space to hold his regular pottery sessions.

Since taking early retirement from secondary school education, Roulet, who studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, has devoted himself to the Vogler studios.