Reflections on the anthroposophical approach to art
‘ … because it is light filled as well, the nature of watercolour gives a luminosity to the picture which I think gives it an innately spiritual quality’
Sue Cramer
In 2021, I was interviewed by the ABC’s Radio National program Soul Search on the topic of Anthroposophy and the anthroposophical approach to art. The keynote of the interview was the art of Hilma af Klint and her spiritual seeking, and as she was deeply influenced by the Spiritualist, Theosophical, and Anthroposophical movements of the early 20th century, the producers thought the anthroposophical perspective on life and art would nicely complement the content given by Sue Cramer, the curator of the af Klint exhibition at the NSW Art Gallery. And so were led eventually to me. You can find the full interview about Klint’s work followed by my contribution here.
Af Klint was something of a free spirit and did not confine herself to one movement, but looked for answers and inspiration from whatever stream she found herself drawn to and read widely of Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, Rosicrucian, Hermetic, Anthroposophical and Theosophical texts.
You can see these influences in her work. When I first saw her paintings, I immediately thought of the early symbolic language of the Rosicrucians and Goethe’s Theory of Colour. Her works after 1922 quite definitely show the influence of the then-new anthroposophical approach to painting, working in the fluid, colour-led wet-on-wet style that has become a signature of the anthroposophic movement. But Hilma af Klint is best known for the art she created that emerged passively in a mediumistic way from communion with spiritual beings.
I am not going to further discuss her artworks here – many others have done this already and have far more knowledge of her life and works. David Adams, art historian and anthroposophist, has made insightful observations on her works here in the Spring/Summer Art Section Newsletter. Post-interview, I would rather reflect on the anthroposophical approach to art into which I have particular insights, and which may hold also clues as to why Rudolf Steiner, who she brought to see her paintings in 1908, did not provide the response to her work that she was hoping for. Perhaps my reflections will complement David Adam’s observations. As an art historian, he studies art from the outside, whereas I live it from the inside.
I am going to talk about four principles of the anthroposophical approach to painting that I use in my work in light of Hilda af Klint’s work, to hopefully provide some insights into how the anthroposophic path is rather different to hers, though she found inspiration in it.
Active, not passive, receptivity
The anthroposophical path, whether in painting or meditation or any other practice, is one where one’s individual consciousness always remains awake and fully present. There are no induced trances or losing your sense of self to the Other, whether it be the material or non-material world. This does not mean you can’t be receptive to things outside of yourself, but it is an active receptivity, not a passive one. Because the danger in passive receptivity is losing oneself – losing oneself to conscious awareness of what you are doing. The ‘ego-less consciousness’ of af Klint’s early mediumistic works could be described in this way.
In my 30 years of teaching watercolour wet-on-wet painting I have often observed how people can easily ‘fall asleep’ while painting wet-on-wet. And then afterwards, when the painting session was over, they would ‘come back’ into themselves and wonder how the painting worked out as it did. ‘Oh! how did that happen?’ they might say. They had not been fully, actively present in the painting, as they were painting. The medium of watercolour with this technique tends to induce this kind of dreaminess.
And whereas this dreaminess is nothing so radical as opening yourself as a passive vessel to unknown forces, as the Spiritualists attempted, nevertheless, you can get something of a glimmer of what this experience may be like if you dream your way through a wet-on-wet painting. There is also not, I should point out, any comparison here to the flow experience, the name given by positive psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi to the state a person enters when so deeply immersed in an experience that everything else superfluous to the experience becomes irrelevant. In flow, you still remain present to yourself, though your sense of time slips away. (Much of my phenomenological research on the creative process in my doctorate compared the flow experience to what my research participants were experiencing).
Active receptivity, however, can and should be cultivated and trained, though it’s easier in some mediums than others. For example, in wet-on-dry painting techniques, such as traditional watercolour, you have to be focused and present continually because of its technical demands and because you must keep stepping back from the work so that the layers can dry. In meditative practices, active receptivity is sometimes practised by continually moving your awareness between focused concentration and open receptivity. Arthur Zajonc, physicist and Goethean scholar, developed this approach in his cognitive breathing practice, where the space left by intense concentration allows an echo or afterimage of attentiveness, so to ‘let come’ such moments of direct experience or insight that are given to us.
Such a technique, cultivated by contemplatives, is comparable with the state of being a painter can enter when they immerse themselves in their medium, by stepping into the painterly experience and allowing the medium to lead the process. And then step back to allow the afterimage of the experience to work upon you. This is a crucial point. It is not about conceptualising the experience, trying to relate it to known concepts or abstract symbols, but about allowing the experience to live within you, giving it space and time to mature and transform the soul, before immersing yourself again into the medium, eyes wide open and receptive to what the medium or Other has to say. You are building on an ever-deepening experience that inwardly transforms you, but always remaining actively conscious in this process.
But this requires repeated practice. Repeated immersions, repeated experiences, each carefully documented, for the medium to reveal its otherness, its innermost being, its essence to us. This is a phenomenological approach that requires a change of attitude of soul towards creativity. Rather than being concerned with self-expression – which cannot let go of the needs and desires of the everyday self – it is about becoming; about growth and self-transformation and being led to new ways of seeing and creating through allowing the nature of the medium to speak its own being. New things, new insights, can then emerge. ( I wrote a little about this in an earlier post.)
In this way, the artist can learn to ‘step into’ the world and experience a deep and living connection to it.
Form is movement come to rest
Form is movement come to rest. This is the essential principle of the anthroposophical understanding of how the world, and human being in the world, is in a constant state of evolving. And this evolving moves in natural cycles that are metamorphic, not repetitive, (read more about this in a much earlier post on drawing). Through each immersion in the medium, into the experience, there is transformation, but a transformation that builds on the previous experiences, and adheres to the laws of the natural world. Phenomenologist Theodor Schwenk revealed these laws through his repeated observations of the dynamics of natural water flow, how these laws reveal their secrets in the natural world. The same laws can be experienced at work in the life of the human soul, in our thinking, which is the source and guide on the creative path.
So the creative process should be one of becoming and of transformation, a kind of always coming-into-being. The artwork reflects this process, and therefore is never finished, only paused. It should leave the potential for something new to emerge out of it. It is future-oriented. By contrast, symbolic art always points to the past, not the present or future. Symbolic art points to knowledge, to what was, rather than the experiencing of what is, which can only be revealed through making such experiences visible, as anew, again and again. .
Form arises out of colour
Form arises out of colour, not the other way round, in the anthroposophic approach to painting. Colours have their own innate gestures or movements that are part of their essential being . These gestures are no secret. Anyone can experience them through painting a colour, just one colour, again and again, constantly re-immersing oneself in the colour, without trying to manipulate it into a form or shape.
To do this you need to paint colour in surfaces: surfaces that do not have hard boundaries that confine them into unmoving forms. You need to allow the colour’s innate qualities to reveal themselves in freedom from superimposed form. This is not a difficult exercise, but does require patience. A contemplative but exploratory approach helps, as does letting go of imposing your own ideas on it. It is almost like a listening. Then you can experience that light, cool yellow does indeed always shine outward, regardless of form: you cannot make shine inwards. Close as it is to light, it demands a breathing out towards the periphery, just as a blue always has something of an inward nature.
Drawing is not painting
One key difference between most modern painting schools and Rudolf Steiner’s approach, is that we make a distinction between drawing and painting, where drawing works with the line (in its manifold expressions) and painting is expressed through surface: many overlapping, interpenetrating surfaces. This does not mean we don’t work with the line at all, but the lines arise out of the meeting and overlapping of surfaces, creating amorphous forms that arise out of the interplay of colours. Therefore, they are not lines, but edges: edges of forms creating by interpenetration surfaces. These edges that bring greater definition to the forms only emerge towards the latter stages of a painting process. This is the secret of techniques such as veil painting: forms emerge gradually in a coming-into-being process that leaves the painter free of fixedness and certainty until the painting is almost fully realised. This approach allows for emergence.
And why watercolour?‘
It’s not just that watercolour has a luminosity that gives it an innately spiritual quality. After all, it can be painted without luminosity. Yet this is hard to do if you allow watercolour’s essential nature, the qualities that belong to water itself, to speak for themselves. Pastels and oils can also have luminosity but it’s the translucency of watercolour that helps colours breathe …. When colours are allowed to breathe, you can experience living and dying and becoming and dying away again. The breathing movement of watercolour leads you across the physical threshold towards the unseen and unknown. It transforms the material substance of pigment through its fluid nature and lifts it to a higher plane. For this reason, Steiner used the watercolour medium on the ceiling of the First Goetheanum where his new artistic impulse was first realised.
In 1907, Steiner was already moving towards this dynamic and metamorphic approach to the visual arts he would fully develop in the murals on the ceilings of the First Goetheanum. As David Adams says, af Klint’s work was channelling a very different approach to the one Steiner was developing.
This post was edited and updated 3rd October 2025.
Painted Space 