|
Preface
By
Katherine Rudolph
A key
to the development of Exploring The Word In Colour and Speech lies
in the courses of work I completed in the fourteen years of my time
at the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland.
The
intertranslation of colour and word were always a guiding
experience for me, and from the beginning, this kind of
interpretation was my artistic, pedagogical and therapeutic
impulse.
There
is a simultaneous experience also in the painter’s world as
such. Through the world of colours, archetypal truths can be
made visible. So, I owe a basic component of my particular
path to the study of colour painting with Gerard Wagner at the
Goetheanum Painting School.
The
above process was, in my case, always accompanied by a study of
Formative Speech and, later, therapeutic viewpoints from
anthroposophy.
So it
is with thanks and reverence that I present this excerpt from
‘Gerard Wagner’, by Elizabeth Wagner-Koch and Theodore
Willman.
Retrospections of Childhood
When a painter
stands in front of his easel and paints, he is making journeys; and
on these journeys, having experiences; and the experiences
penetrate more deeply than any others that he could possibly
have.
Therefore, one
should look at a painter’s paintings, if he wishes to learn
something about the painter’s life. For on these painting
journeys, the true painter unites much more with his own deed than
he can realise, or consciously will in the moment of
creating.
If in the course
of a biography one wants to hold to that which was meaningful on
the painter’s path then, from the first a problem occurs; because
when one goes back in the memory and looks into nature as it
appeared – then every single thing becomes meaningful. The
little child sees the smallest, most separate thing: the
violet, the spider, the anemone, the grasshopper…everything that
grew and crawled, that swam and flew, in short, everything
that caught his eye as if it were of the greatest
interest.
The child’s eye is
alive and sees the life within each thing; and this life speaks
directly and utterly to the child’s living awareness. He
becomes what he sees and therefore every impression of that time is
meaningful. Only later does the painter notice that the
colour experience which he is trying to bring about has an inner
relationship to the quality of his sense-impressions in earliest
childhood.
An early call to
attention for the painter’s destiny was to be heard when one day,
an English governess was leading her two children along a path
through woodlands and meadows. To the children’s amazement
she bent and scooped up a handful of spawn near the banks of a
small pond. This she placed in a large jar in the nursery and
tended it until tadpoles wriggled out and gradually turned into
little frogs. Finally she painted a picture of this process
in watercolour on a large paper which she hung up in the
nursery…
| 