A Contemplation On Surfaces as Interfaces to the Spirit

[00:00:10]contemplation on surfaces. It interfaces to the spirit.

[00:00:20]So it's very much I'm talking about Rud Steiner's impulse for painting for the future. And usually people talk when they talk about Real Steiner's impulse they will talk about mainly his color lectures and sometimes they will talk about his uh training sketches. Those are lectures that I've given quite often frequently in the past. However, I want to talk today about surfaces because people don't necessarily think talk much about the nature of the surface and yet realstein had quite a lot to say about surfaces.

[00:00:58]I also have a verse to start with. It's sort of my verse of the year at the moment. The artist does not bring the divine to earth by letting it flow into the world. She elevates it to the the worldly to the divine.

[00:01:14]Beauty is illusion because it conjures before our senses a reality which as such appears as an ideal world.

[00:01:25]He start goes on to say consider the what but consider more thoroughly the how because the how is what matters. The what remains bound to the sense given but the how reveals the ideal.

[00:01:43]So in a way this uh quote by Rud Steiner from Gerta as the father of a new aesthetics sums up what I want to bring to you.

[00:01:55]This contemplation this series of ponderings or but uh also uh learnings which may meander a bit at times but hopefully you will find interesting. But the artist does not bring the divine to the earth by letting it flow into the world but elevates it to the divine.

[00:02:19]This is very much how Relstein saw for instance painting.

[00:02:26]Consider the what. Consider the content but more consider how thoroughly how you will bring the content because that is what matters because it's the cont it's the it's sorry it's the the how the way in which you do it the process which the and the medium and all these aspects of how which reveals the ideal.

[00:02:55]So what is the surface? We all know what a surface is. A surface from a pragmatic perspective, it's the outermost or uppermost layer of a physical object.

[00:03:06]It's the region of the object first we first observe and with which other objects interact. And we tend to equate seeing the surface of an object with seeing an object.

[00:03:19]So there is this two-dimensional boundary between the inner and outer.

[00:03:23]And painting is very much of course a two-dimensional art.

[00:03:32]It's a picture art. It's a picture when in painting we get the sense of literally it's a picture of an image of something. Painting of a landscape is but an image of the landscape. Yeah. So, it's very different to things like architecture and sculpture or music and poetry. It's very much lives in this two-dimensional world, the picture space.

[00:04:02]But what is an interface? An interface is a word we've become familiar with through technology. You know, the user interface is the point of a interaction between a computer and human beings.

[00:04:14]It's a place where we communicate with our technology and certainly uh when I was doing my um degree on on uh things which included web design um the creation of a website. The interface was actually the very last thing you created after you'd done all the information architecture and the coding and sort of built the insides of the the actual workings of the website. Then you had to put an interface between the actual website and the human being in order that they could communicate through that interface.

[00:04:54]But they're also of course natural interfaces and these interfaces can act as thresholds to other states.

[00:05:03]So, anyone who's familiar with my work will know that I talk quite well uh a lot about water and that I will often show this image which is an image an image a capture of the movements of the currents through water frozen in time from one of those uh websites. Those live streaming websites will show you at any time of the day or night the movements of the water air currents through right around the globe. And we see then this uh meandering these movements these dynamic threads movements which are in fact in water and air. They're actually much more like they're not lines. They are they are surfaces. And of course the earth's surfaces are places of enormous interaction that profoundly influence the surface processes and the o our overall environment. It's very complex.

[00:05:59]you know, all the layers between, not just between water and air and air and earth and water and earth, but into the different levels into the stratosphere and all kinds of other scientific things of whose names I cannot recall to mind because I'm not a scientist, not of that sort anyway.

[00:06:21]But the boundaries uh between the what Steiner likes to call the super sensible and the sensible worlds are also interfaces.

[00:06:31]The inner and outer boundaries, the inmost world and our outmost world. And these are threshold places, boundaries out which in our ordinary consciousness we do not consciously cross though we may come up against them. Things like meditation and the arts are tools are ways of you might say creating the the portals through which we can communicate or we can receive and get become in some kind of active communication with the unseen spiritual dimensions both inner and outer.

[00:07:21]Something like Gertian phenomenology leads us towards the outer boundary.

[00:07:28]Things like meditation and painting lead us towards the inner boundaries.

[00:07:35]So water itself is of course quite an extraordinary interface. We see there on the right an image of water that you know again a tremendous dynam multistranded multi-layered interactions going on all the time of which we see here once again but a frozen picture of this constant process of dissolving and binding. dissolving and binding out of which forms in the land and forms in the water are created out of this constant flow meeting various resistances. So water is extremely impressionable and this uh points to its intrinsic creative nature. It's kind of I think it's Navalus. Is it Navalus?

[00:08:28]Is it Navalus who calls water something like the ultimate um creative substance?

[00:08:34]Or maybe it's Tador Shank who's uh saying that. Anyway, but water is certainly a transformative element and water also is a threshold.

[00:08:47]You know, it's a an interface. It can be an interface between the seen and the unseen. You only have to think of fairy tales and legends of the role that water often plays in the um the hero or the protagonist being able to cross from the earthly realm into the a spiritual realm such as Fairyland. you know, the the the protagonist comes to a stream and they cross over the stream and reality changes or in in the um story of Passiful, Passiful going through the forest comes to a lake and when he crosses the lake, the lake on which he meets the uh fisher king, when he crosses the lake to go to the Grail Castle, he goes, you might say, out of ordinary time into a quite different space. He crosses in a a threshold there. The water itself in this dynamic quality has this effect of enlivening our thinking, our perception and bringing you know dynamic movement into our being. Anyone who's uh done a lot of wet on wet can relate to uh how dynamic movement is brought into our being just by painting with wet on wet for an hour.

[00:10:15]So what has this got to do with uh what I'm talking about? Well, I wanted to it's leading me up to water the nature of water in watercolor. Now Walla was really preferred medium for painting although he himself used a lot of um pastels and chalk to sketch things out.

[00:10:38]We'll talk I'll talk about that in a minute. But when people talk about watercolor, they tend to talk about it as oh yes, the different colors. And people don't really tend to spend much time talking about the water aspect of water color at Quarel.

[00:10:55]And the thing about watercolor which I imagine um particularly attracts uh Rud Steiner is that paint a physical substance a pigment originally earth you know elements of the earth like plant and mineral colors when mixed with water and dissolved into water lifts the physical element to a higher state through this transparent medium. So you might say there's a a transformation of substance goes on when you mix your paint into the water. And for this reason, Stiner preferred color in water as the medium for the vision for painting that he had for the future.

[00:11:54]Because in doing that we bring something of a spiritual element into the physical and we lift this physical material up to you might say a higher nature. And anybody who's looked further into meditation and um contemplation also knows that uh working with water when one's lifted into a water state there's a certain loosening goes on in the four in the four-fold human being in in our in our in our earthly being. We're loosened a little bit out of our earthly everyday nature.

[00:12:35]And as Rsteiner says, then when we apply lifeless paint to a surface, we must get the light behind the surface.

[00:12:48]We must spiritualize the surface to create a secret inner radiance.

[00:12:55]And it's only by using paint in water that one can uh and semi-transparent or transparent color in water that you can really get the light behind the surface.

[00:13:09]Yes, I know other I know one can um particular artists are able to do it with other mediums, but this ability to get the light behind the surface and and you might say spiritualize it really lifts it to not only this other level, but kind of opens up what we think of the two-dimensional picture state. It starts to open up a portal or an interface to the soul realm.

[00:13:43]So when painting with gleaming water surfaces to use Rishstein as or a um the way it's been translated anyway in his color lectures when you uh paint with colored water surfaces of course as I said you're overcoming the image or the pictorial two-dimensional nature of painting to a certain extent you're opening up this portal. But he also says and he goes to on uh he talks about this at length in his color lectures the nature of image colors and luster colors picture colors and uh shining colors glance built um the German words for what he how he describes the different colors and he says that it's only by lifting image color to uh this gleaming to a luster shining state that you awaken its essence that you you can go beyond the merely pictorial to something of the essential.

[00:14:51]So when painting with many transparent surfaces overlapping then you're creating one whole surface of many interpenetrating surfaces very much like you might say imitating water.

[00:15:06]So I create something new out of the materiality of the physical world and then I can create something as an artist as a painter with as a kind of interface to the divine.

[00:15:20]It's time for a picture.

[00:15:25]When looking uh I particularly chose this one. It's a painting called meditation by Beep Asenza. Now I was trained in the Asenza school or I did um uh a short training short training in it. I don't think uh the current Asenza schools in Dornock and in Basel and that um would particularly recognize my current style as having anything much to do with a sensor. But that is where I did I originally started and then I went on and did other trainings and then over the last 30 years I've developed my own approach. But I particularly like this one of Senza because of this image of the human being in meditation in contemplation opening up behind them in their back space so to speak. This this whole world this interface literally this interface with the spiritual world. And there we see kind of uh uh ascends as kind of typical spiritual beings in geniuses inspiring beings speaking to the human being there in contemplation. That's very much the theme that I'm looking at when I'm talking about painting surfaces in transparent color as opening up these interaces interfaces sorry interpaces interaces to the spiritual world.

[00:17:04]So I just need to clarify something here and that is uh the drawing in Rudolfph Steiner's approach is not painting. So many people think that painting is when you use a brush and you use paint and therefore it's painting and drawing is when you use a pencil and that's drawing. But in actual fact, here we're referring to drawing as being working with the line and painting working with the surface.

[00:17:38]Of course, it's very common for people to you to draw with the paintbrush. It's almost the first thing people do when they get a paintbrush and paint is to start drawing. But Rud Steiner is is asking people not to do this and he has quite a lot to say here. Some of it quite um very straightforward, very um direct. So because drawing is basically representing something by lines, but in the real world of course there's no such thing as a line.

[00:18:17]And he goes on to say talking to the teachers, "Drawing is really only of real value when it's carried out in full awareness that it gives us nothing real.

[00:18:27]It it's a tool, but it doesn't actually give us re anything real. It's kind of untruth because the line itself was an illusion. and in personal conversation to tof the artist who worked with him on the stained glass windows in the first Gertanum the uh the woman who's responsible you might say for carrying out his instructions for how to work with black and white shaded drawing and take that into etching the stained glass windows in conver uh a series of conversations he's much more direct and says the outline is a lie. The contour drawn in advancement is enslavement. So he doesn't hold back on that and in personal conversation to her.

[00:19:17]And then he in the lectures to the teachers then he uh draws this sketch and says well here is a surface of blue and here is a surface of green as they might meet with the sea and the sky meeting. And of course the line appears not as a line on its own, an abstraction, a one-dimensional uh object, but as a meeting of two surfaces. So of course that's how one sees it in painting on the the one on the left. Put it into painting. It's fairly obvious. The blue meets the green and they create a line where they meet and edges. And this is um when you then start to then take that surface over they start to they overlap each other then of course you start to get many lines or what we rather call edges.

[00:20:12]So these are created of course out of the overlapping of surfaces.

[00:20:18]And of course then you can build up more and more and more many many many many layers. this constant building up of these surfaces which are constantly, you might say, opening up this interface, this portal to allowing something else to stream through. But before I say uh go into what it's what's streaming through, I just want to go on a little bit more about uh the nature of the line. This is comes from very much the um my artistic therapy training.

[00:21:00]When we look at the three-fold human being, we see that drawing is connected to the upper body, to the head area, painting to the middle realm, and modeling to the lower body. This is a, you know, one of those diagrams used in artistic therapy trainings all the time. And we can see on the left it says drawing the the drawing relates to the line the one-dimensional painting to the surface the two-dimensional and modeling the form the threedimensional and of course we have our thinking feeling and willing. So the line is very much connected to thinking whereas the surface is very much connected to the feeling life. Not Yeah.

[00:21:53]So for the feeling life not just in terms of oh I have feelings I I like this or I don't like this but rather feelings or often uh that um untransatable wordimong or uh what Kandinsky uh the artist Kandinsky says is actually something deeper than the everyday crude you know his words kind of crude emotions that we have or what Merlo Ponty The phenomenologist, the French phenomenologist might say those kind of you might say not those not those kind of everyday emotions that lie on the surface of the ocean but lie deep deep in the depths. that that kind of feeling those uh it's a kind of a higher level of feeling of which quite a lot of the time much of the time certainly in everyday life we don't tap into that that area of um what what is meant by feeling here.

[00:23:00]So, I just thought I'd put this uh one this sketch, this pastel motif by Ra Steiner called the three-fold human being, which I'm sure many of you are familiar with. Sometimes it's used on the covers of books.

[00:23:17]We see here in this sketch, which is faded, that the threefold, the upper part of the three-fold human being is just the head.

[00:23:30]There's this sort of you might say the thought the thinking comes in here. The will area of the human being is this interesting little kind of sphere of the of of kind of the modeling in the you know where this all this kind of modeling sculpting of the will this ex if we exercising our will and in the middle there we have a more developed uh image of the human being in this green area with this sort of um opening up the middle realm of the human being. So taking that into painting, you can just see the little head or the willing human being and the predominance of the head in the more for the thinking person. But painting very much works in this surface area.

[00:24:38]So as I said lines in painting in real Steiner's approach to painting are edges. Lines arise out of the meeting and overlapping of surface creating these amorphous forms that arise out of this interplay.

[00:24:52]These edges bring greater definitions to form that emerge only towards the latter stage of the painting process. This is the secret of uh this approach to wet on dry painting. One that I particularly tend to push in my approach as painting as a coming into being, a slow coming into being where the forming only comes in the very latest stages of the painting.

[00:25:27]There's always this holding back, holding back, leaving the painter free from fixedness and certainty until the painting is almost fully realized. And this is, as I say, it allows for emergence.

[00:25:41]So it allows not only for emergence of forms, but it also allows for emergence of something to speak through the medium.

[00:25:53]So if you are going to draw says realstein to the teachers when using drawing then you need to start with painting working with color or out of lightened shade.

[00:26:06]That's just an example out of some old paintings of mine of surfaces obviously not the same painting but surfaces that remain amorphous which start to become more formed out of edges opening up all these you might say planes and then can become very very formed. So it's not that it's not that one shouldn't work with form but it's how it's it comes back to that how how you come to that point and the slow process of emergence out of which you work with it.

[00:26:44]Just have to say a few more words about drawing.

[00:26:47]This does not mean that one never draws lines at all. you know, we shouldn't be pedantic about this and say no drawing, no line drawing at ever. You know, we must only paint with surfaces.

[00:27:00]Uh, and in any case, you'd only have to look at some of the paintings that I have shown you or I'm going to show you or that you see, you know, from various uh artists who've done anthroposophical trainings in one of the schools that in fact you often see lines. These lines are of course are invariably edges as I've already described these interfaces where you might the soul world and the earthly world meet and this is often very necessary for I I believe that paintings using watercolor using particularly in wet on dry painting um of which veil painting is just one approach.

[00:27:44]I find it necessary for compositional but really to incarnate them. You don't want to stay out in always in luciferic floating sort of color spaces.

[00:27:56]It's about it comes down to understanding why you're using the line and what it means in what you're doing.

[00:28:03]And of course you'll also see it when um [clears throat] in that the line is used then just to give a hint of a face.

[00:28:12]The ma real reason for not using the line, not drawing with your paintbrush, but working with surfaces is to overcome the innate forming fixing tendency that we all have to immediately come to form because people want to make sense. Now in my experience of teaching painting, it is actually very difficult for most people not to draw lines, not to outline and not to draw form. It's it's it's to let go of that to allow oneself to go into a state of uncertainty.

[00:28:55]Uh and of course as it says there there is, as I said, there's this human uh tendency to want to make sense of forms.

[00:29:03]you only have to think about things like uh the Gestalt principles where you can you know see a whole lot of dots and you want to form it into the mind your perceptual you you perceive it and and there's this kind of trying to turn lots of discrete surfaces or objects into create making something of it. Yeah. Anybody who's um worked much with uh wet on dry painting knows that at a certain point often quite early in the po uh in the process that they will start to see things.

[00:29:41]Yeah. Oh, a frog. Oh, I see a you know a lion. Oh, I can see a girl with long hair. Girls with long hair appear a lot of the time, I might add. Um or a partner will come in and say, "Oh, I see what it is. I see now what it is that you're drawing." Yeah, you know they people want to make sense of it and it doesn't help you might say in a way that um Stoner's training sketches are almost all drawings uh even though he himself did not want them to be used as drawings but he they are his training sketches are a path for the artists for painting bringing it into surfaces into into dynamic movement. And uh one of I should say um you know one of Steiner's two sins in the visual art with both is both drawing outlines which fixes things into fixed concepts and copying Just want to talk then a little bit about shaded drawing because this is uh this is the kind of drawing that Rud Steiner thought was uh did was the the right way to work with drawing where the line becomes surface.

[00:31:14]And he goes on to say works whose content take place in the soul should only be rendered out of color. However, works that relate to what is spiritual, to what is of the nature of thought, should be created out of black and white drawing, shaded drawing.

[00:31:34]And I understand that he uh had hoped that to see his book, the philosophy of spiritual activity, in fact illustrated with black and white shaded drawings.

[00:31:50]I don't think don't know if anyone's actually attempted to take that on.

[00:31:55]So we see now that it's not that one mustn't use the line, but it's how one uses the line.

[00:32:05]And like like when painting in surfaces, when painting with shaded drawing, you're always in this state of something is emerging out of what you're building up. the many many lines that you're building up, there's this always this element of the unknown approaching you.

[00:32:24]So that's just a couple of examples. I'm sure you're all familiar with shaded drawing, but many people don't realize that the shaded drawing is in fact that the lines should keep going. Yeah.

[00:32:36]All the surface all the objects in this drawing which comes from um it's a drawing by Ava Mace uh art therapist.

[00:32:46]All the forms arise out of the lines that become surfaces and creating all these little surfaces which then turn into objects. And these rather blurred images on the right are from an absolute master of shaded drawing, Gertroud Goodwin.

[00:33:08]The the bookshop in uh Sydney used to have a series of 12 cards from her zodiac series. She's a English sculptor and um works with shaded drawing. And these are just two very blurred images from her uh astrological series. They're very blurred because she quite sensibly only makes what's available online that you can access on the internet are in incredibly small JPEGs so that her images aren't um stolen by other people and used without her permission.

[00:33:53]However, if one could just imagine this technique taken into this extraordinary interplay of movements as we see here, then one can get a sense that's that's all lines going through all there. So, as I said, she's a absolute master of this work.

[00:34:15]So back to back to watercolor, back to surfaces in painting.

[00:34:21]The surface like water should not when you're painting it be flat, but it has movement. So it has this impressionable uh very mobile quality to it. And again in one of those little um what do they call it? uh conversation anecdotal things of Rud Steiner saying to Tenev is that he g put up this drawing and said you do not when she brought out a picture of the Madonna and child and the child lying on straw said you don't need to make the straw so naturalistic you could make it out you of um these kind of aic cloudlike form form so that one does not know sorry what it really is. I'm just trying to remove all the pictures of everybody out of the way so I can actually read the end of the quote and he says to her study the movements of the colors in the painting of the small capola.

[00:35:37]What is around things? What is between things?

[00:35:41]What leads to the athetheric which what leads you across that threshold through the interface of color or shaded drawing through these surfaces that is what one should look for that is what one should aim for.

[00:36:04]So studying the color movements in the painting of the small cap polar.

[00:36:12]Once again, I'm sure many of you seen these many times before. These are uh the one on the in fact um the one on the left is a an artist uh impression somebody who was a contemporary of Steiner. I can't bring his name to my Arold Roan Stern possibly. Yeah.

[00:36:36]And we have then uh a smaller area here of the motif of the fifth post Atlantean epoch with Araman and Lucifer literally face to face one the negative space of the other which you can see just here that's just a closeup but what we really see what I'm really you know asked Steiner was asking uh us to look at here is this continually interweaving of surfaces. This overlapping surfaces which he says is how we would experience the soul world. That is, you know, not that without this fixedness, without these forms that stay in static in the way we're used to, but something that you have to imagine is in a constant state of coming into being and disappearing again. And where everything and everyone, all spiritual beings o are in constantly, you might say, overlapping each other.

[00:37:52]And in the very few paint paintings we have from him, he tries to demonstrate this and he says uh there we have his um painting of the metamorphic plant and his mother and child new life watercolor which he painted in the last year of his life 1924.

[00:38:18]And we see there this uh use him him him finding his way with this uh this creating something with these luminous surfaces that overlap each other. Now Ralph Steiner himself said about watercolor painting that he needed 30 years really to practice it in order to become really be able to work with it in the way that he believed uh it should be worked with.

[00:38:51]which basically leaves all painters in the position of of saying, well, I may have painted for 5 10 15 20 30 40 years, but obviously there's still more to learn and still more ways to um to to work with to to understand this medium.

[00:39:12]So emergence as I've mentioned before is is is is central to this rudstein saw as the the use of these colored transparent surfaces. [snorts] So when we the you know when we think of the world including the human being the we are everything in the physical world is a densification of something higher something uh purer uh of invisible forces.

[00:39:50]Movement itself is a process of constant dissolve like water bind and dissolve bind and dissolve. one only has to think back to his descriptions of the earth during say the Lamuran period and where he describes the world as being in a much more plastic mobile form. uh rather um he uses a slightly unfortunate phrase spinach like that you have this sense of how in the very very earlier stages of human and um of earth evolution and the human within it that the the physical form the hardened physical form as we know it today is at the end of a very very long process This where gradually form arose out of movement that cooled and you might literally say cooled and condensed and came to rest. Rather like in the flow of natural water that you see in meander forms in a river where uh little islands are created where the flow is gradually the energy of the flow is gradually cut off and it kind of creates a sort of a static area of earth away from the dynamic central movement of the water.

[00:41:25]So, as I said, working with transparent surfaces allows for this emergent quality, this coming into being.

[00:41:34]And painting in this way points to what is, what is, what to uh to the future and to becoming and to allowing for revelations to emerge out of this slow process. Whereas symbolic arterus says always points to the past. It points to knowledge to what was just a few more anecdotal quotes from Steiner. See, I've got 10 more minutes.

[00:42:13]It'll move on again from these personal conversations in how to work. He was all all this is in these personal conversations during the creation of the first 30 anam how when the artists came to him and said but how do we work in these ways here Dr. How do we bring these things? How do we make what you're telling us? How do we do it? He says that working with these unknown things requires an attentiveness and an inner activity and it liberates you from dead intellectual fixed images. This is of course he's also talking about shaded drawing as well as painting. It frees you from the head and concentrates your awareness in the middle realm.

[00:43:04]And he goes on to say, "The intellect is a bad dog when it comes to the artistic." Of course, you must have a thought, an idea, but then you just leave it behind. Forget it and only work from feeling. You never ought to know beforehand how the picture or composation will look when it is finished. You must wait for the composition and never visualize it or plan it beforehand. Everything must arise out of this slow coming into being. You must not try to superimpose your fixed images that you have in your head. However difficult it is or however enticing they may be, you must not plan that this is how you will form it.

[00:43:59]just some uh get into some paintings now. Some paintings by Beep Asenza. I should have said before, for those of you who don't know, Beep Asenza had a painting school in Dornak itself around about the same time as uh Gar Vagnner had his school. I don't know who started first.

[00:44:23]For Beepia Senza, the working with the colored surfaces was very much had to be contemplated in complete interior silence.

[00:44:34]It's how he saw painting something. When we think back to that first painting I showed you of his of meditation, it's something that you must have interior silence to allow things to emerge.

[00:44:51]And of course we see here these interfaces, these surfaces where edges appear, where other edges that then allow so openings up in different ways.

[00:45:06]And surfaces of course can be all different sizes and shapes, all different ways of using the brush stroke. There's no particular set way of doing it.

[00:45:18]It could be, you know, these very very tiny little areas. It could be these long more streaming areas. Yeah.

[00:45:28]And he we know and but everything then just to show you something from his sketchbooks is you work, you know, you start off just by working with color chords and these working out how surfaces overlap. And he had all these sketchbooks where you see this over, you know, all these little exercises in what happens when surfaces overlap.

[00:45:54]Cuz he says when you paint color surfaces overlapping each other in layers in surfaces, you create temple spaces of experience.

[00:46:04]It's just a building up from his sketchbook of surfaces that as they gradually meet and overlap gradually a his little picture arises out of this emerging process.

[00:46:23]Two of his that I think particularly demonstrate this uh approach. on the left in temple on the right threshold.

[00:46:34]One is working very much with colors and black, the other one with colors and white in the soul world. And then the threshold of the soul world where the surfaces start to break down and open up these spaces beyond.

[00:47:08]I want just to talk briefly about the spiritual nature of the arts.

[00:47:14]Art is a bridge between the sensible and the super sensible. says Rud Steiner.

[00:47:19]It's actually the name of a lecture by him. Art as a bridge between the sensible and the super sensible.

[00:47:28]Oh, the sculptor Michael Howard says, "Works of art are vehicles for spiritual qualities. As artists, we bring these spiritual qualities into the sphere of human doing, of human life. By so doing we become responsible for the spiritual elements of the work of the artist upon the artist upon other people and on human evolution. Michael Howard is an American sculptor who is unlike Asenza still um active and alive and then Kandinski painting is an art and art is not vague preuction production I should say. If art refrains from doing this work, a chasm remains unbridged.

[00:48:18]For no other power can take the place of art in this activity and at time when the human soul is gaining greater strength, art will so grow in power. For the two are inextricably connected and complementaryary to one another.

[00:48:39]However, at times when the soul tends to be choked by material disbelief, art becomes purposeless.

[00:48:45]We talk of art for art's sake. Then the bond between art and soul is drugged into unconsciousness. He says in his manifesto. So yeah. So yes, we we understand art is a bridge between the uh sensible and the sensible, the physical and the spiritual hidden world.

[00:49:09]However, it may not be quite so well known that the painting itself is connected to the experiences as he says we let flow into our waking body between falling asleep and waking up.

[00:49:41]In turn, what emerges in painting then is is a kind of a reproduction of a super sensible reality. If we are able to have made ourselves, you might say, sufficiently permeable to allow these experiences.

[00:49:59]So this actually comes from a very interesting series of lectures called understanding art. Uh he talks about painting particularly in the one called the superensible origin of artistic understanding.

[00:50:13]But he goes on to talk about how different arts, architecture, sculpture, music, poetry, painting, ury, all draw, you might say, on different experiences of the spiritual world. I won't go into them. You can read it for yourself. I'm only talking about painting here. But he does say that when working with the line, you are working with a memory of prenatal life life. But if you want to paint with expanded consciousness, it includes the spiritual world, you must paint out of color, out of color surfaces because it's color is what lives in the spir in the astral world.

[00:51:00]Color in the astral world is not just a phenomena attached to objects as we un tend to think of it in the physical world but is in fact spiritual beings.

[00:51:17]And when we work in this way, painting can then become a revelation of the spiritual world that surrounds us in space and permeates us from space.

[00:51:28]that world in which we find ourselves in between falling asleep and waking up. So quite different to the world after death and before rebirth which he connects to the other arts.

[00:51:46]Now, I just thought now I'd show you some paintings from uh people in my Friday master class uh series who they have kindly allowed me to show them to you. And they aren't necessarily finished because I wanted um to show paintings that you you might say are people working with trying to this emerge these colored surfaces and allowing things to emerge out of the surfaces. In fact, these paintings come from a course I did last year on working with the threshold all different thresholds. The threshold of falling asleep and waking up. The threshold of birth and death. The thresholds of me forgetting and remembering the seasonal thresholds. All these different thresholds. The guardian at the thresholds from we worked with the lectures from macrocosm microcosm.

[00:52:48]And I think we have here in the this is um forgive me if I get these wrong people.

[00:52:55]Uh the water to air over the transition, the threshold from water to air, the threshold of death, crossing into death, the excarnation process and the waking up, sleeping and waking threshold.

[00:53:18]all these where people are trying to work out of these very in you know many many often many many small surfaces to allow something to speak through it.

[00:53:33]These are some other ones also from some of them are from the threshold. The two on the right are from the threshold series working with thresholds.

[00:53:50]Sorry, I can't remember the exact name whether this was I think again it was waking and sleeping. Sorry to the person who know can tell me what it is. And these other ones are working with colors on the that are close to the threshold.

[00:54:11]Nothing coming to recognizable form, but really just constantly trying to work with opening up a kind of a space.

[00:54:29]I want to just say a little bit on painting spiritual beings. This is one of the areas that um talks about this about when working with spiritual beings that they should arise out of movement. as we saw back on the first Gertanum arise out of the interpenetration of surfaces. And he says you must imagine these are sketches of his that he did for the um the small Capola in the first Gertanum Fast genius on the left, the Greek initiate on the right that you must imagine these beings as arising out of these continual movements or these continual forming forces, energies if you want to call them that, out of which countenance briefly emerges and then recedes again. So quite a different way of painting spiritual beings than the kind of conventional one that we are familiar with from um art history of where spiritual beings generally certainly in the last 500 years tend to all look like uh high higher level human beings, beautiful um human beings with wings and and flowing drapes. We have a very different picture of how he says how to work with these. And then he gave these sketches then to the painters and just a couple of examples of people uh again from my masterclass group of working then trying to paint Lucifer.

[00:56:26]This is in two stages of the same painting obviously. out of many many surfaces out of that same streaming movement where there's only uh a little bit of drawing at the the the outlining of eyes at the very very end but really one should feel that Lucifer as it is Luc here we have Lucifer and Araman on the right because you can't paint Lucifer without Araman the two always appear together so Lucifer in this He described as emerging out of this constant uh yellow red sort of turning in on itself. this vase that appears out of this kind of um sulfurous yellow red and then the painting of Araman because Araman also despite the fact that we think of Araman as being trapped in the physical world and we see him in you know in the sculptures and paintings and painted in very hard outlines.

[00:57:32]Nevertheless, still arman also emerges in the spiritual world is in is is an emer being of coming into being of emergence and dying away much more of course dying away than the Lucifer.

[00:57:52]You can just see the aromatic profile emerging here out of this painting of black and indigo. And that's just a few more of people show in their showing their process. I I I have all these photos of people's process cuz I always en encouraging people to put up paintings of their process on our uh digital notice of board. So we can see this emerging process. We have uh a male on the left emerging out of meteor a meteoric iron activity. We had the beginnings of the representative of humanity with Lucifer again as this great sort of movement about to falling down and the Christ being which then comes more into form at the very end of the painting here.

[00:59:10]Just a couple more. Again, people working with how do I bring how do I work with bringing spiritual beings out of the surface, out of the the movements.

[00:59:25]Another myale beginning to sorry not my Lucifer emerging a myale again more out of the meaty activity of meteoric iron and then a Lucifer not a pretty Lucifer either but a Lucifer more expressing you might say that not the the the the beautiful higher being but the the being of um overweening pride and greed and everything that uh British Steiner describes Lucifer as embodying in his fallen state.

[01:00:10]And then of course Arman created out of surfaces just surfaces of black and violet slowly emerging as the surfaces get deeper and darker and are more and more layers uh over each other until the countenance the hardened scoloric countenance of him starts to emerge.

[01:00:44]Just a few more of Iron because I really I really like them. I really like you know it's uh Steiner says yes we we need to we need to we need to actively paint Iron Man. We must not ignore him. We must actively paint these beings. So this is just other exper other people feeling their way into the aromatic energy of of something emerging out of the fixedness and the emergence of an aromatic energy or aromatic activity out of the black physicality of the earth. And these two other ones um also emerging out of these surfaces. And you can see that these surfaces are not necessarily nice the nice beautiful um clear uh colors and forms that we tend to people very often associate with what um veil painting but rather a much more working much more strongly out of the nature of black. black as the lifeless image of death.

[01:02:10]What does effect does this have upon the artist? May have certain it has certain effects upon the viewer and but what upon the artists themselves?

[01:02:24]This quote from Ra Steiner, men living a constant illusion, believing themselves to be something separate simply through being enclosed within their skin. Separate they cannot be.

[01:02:41]Just as the finger can be nothing without the whole organism, we on earth are in a higher sense in the same position of the finger on our organism.

[01:02:52]So when one is painting you can't help but have as in in any activity how you do it coming back to that how has an effect upon the being of the artist and one must imagine that if one works constantly with drawing lines and creating fixed forms then this can have uh a particular effect on one's uh soul. It shapes you in a particular way.

[01:03:24]Whereas you constantly working with surfaces trying to work with something emerging, something that is uncertain, something that with these surfaces opening up this interplay between yourself and spiritual activity. Then this also has the effect of gradually making the human being who works in this way [clears throat] somewhat more or often very much more transparent in their own being. This is something anyone who's trained in the anthroposphical art therapies will know very well how how um different therapies will work upon this loosening this certain effects in the way they change our four-fold organization. So with painting you must imagine just as with a uh ureiththmist working for many many years shaping with aeric these forming forces the constantly working with surfaces these emerg that emergence brings one's own being into a very different inner space as well and it's will bring you into a different relationship to the world.

[01:04:46]So just to finish to go back to that image of the painter meditating, working with the inner ascenders's inner silence, opening up an interface between themselves and the spiritual world.

[01:05:14]The source of the artistic is the inner experience of the human being. The artistic arises out of inner contemplation and tries to bring to expression that which can only be felt inwardly experienced inwardly says Rules Steiner.

[01:05:35]actually in a lecture about ury but also appropriate to painting.

[01:05:42]And I would just like to give some picture credits to the people who apart from Beia Senza and Gertroud Goodwin and Ava Mace to the people who kindly allowed me to use their paintings.

[01:06:00]And that is where I will finish.