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(Please click on image to enlarge)
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(Please click on image to enlarge)
An Impulse of Transformation and Growth Through Colour and Word
While working with people in need of special care, I have come upon an impulse for therapeutic use of four arts: painting, speech formation, eurythmy and writing in connection with one another. It can unfold in many directions.
Handicapped people, also so-called normal children and adults who have particular social problems can open up and express themselves gradually better in connection with colour dynamic, colour gesture and colour dialogue. In the case of deaf or mute people, I have experienced improvement in the utterance of vowels and, in one case, the beginning of new abilities to speak, in relation to colour exercises followed by intoning of certain vowels related to them.
The following process is carried through:
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The person paints the colour sequence in the technique best suited to the problem.
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He hears the corresponding vowel qualities intoned in the same sequence.
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He speaks the vowels and experiences the spoken mood and its relation to the painted mood.
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He might follow this by doing the vowel sequence in Eurythmy or speaking a little verse in which the rhythm and words evoke the mood which he first experienced in the painting sequence.
One can direct this transformation directly and fine attuned to the art that the person needs for his development. Balance is brought out of the vowels and corresponding colour qualities. Through the speech activity, which has an essentially incarnating effect, a breathing of the aforesaid sequence of colour into rhythm and verse can be brought down into the limbs to deepen and enhance the healing experience. This is, of course, why a beginning to describe a process which one must, of course, observe in order to understand and use for further research. Colour activates the giving aspect in speaking.
But here is another question: To what extent might this therapy be applied to solving shared problems in a wider social sense? What is deafness? To some degree we might all be ‘deaf’ in relation to understanding truths which we are not evolved enough to grasp, or to qualities in soul and the personality of others who are not akin to our own temperaments. We hear words which are spoken in conversation, but often comprehend a very limited meaning and mistake this for the whole experience.
In a similar way: What is muteness? Handicapped people often cannot express themselves with all the sounds of the alphabet. Some cannot even utter one sound or one intelligible word. While we so-called normal people find ourselves ‘mute’ in social situations, totally incapable of saying the words that make a social problem comprehensible to one another. Our communication breaks down and we become ‘blind’ to one another on a soul-spiritual level.
By opening up to the universal qualities inherent in the colours and the vowels and learning to transform a mood from one sphere to the other, a process of social development can begin to evolve through the gradual deepening of individual insight. It may even be possible in time to come to specific experiences in colour paintings, drama and verse (through the process described here) which may provide therapeutic answers to communication problems concerning families and groups of people.
The human eye is a metamorphosis of ear and larynx (1). By using this indication we may find a help in ‘seeing’ as a process of giving and receiving. The inner eyes has a specific connection to the receiving quality of the ear, that we experience in listening and the complementary colours (ie, the process of ‘contemplating’ a painting, as it is developing). The outer eye has the opposite connection: The giving quality of the larynx that we experience in speaking. It calls forth the activity of ‘focusing’ and directing the vision. By various painting techniques one can bring the ‘focusing’ or ‘contemplating’ into simultaneous balance. For, indeed the eye is constantly synthesizing these two polarities.
This kind of balance, when applied to the realm of solving shared problems, can be compared to giving a fellow human being his ‘space’, letting freedom rise in meeting one another fact to face, which is indeed a healing factor in the present time.
– Katherine Rudolph