The works here are inspired by a sequence of motifs called the Seven Training Sketches or the Friedwart sketches, as they were given to Waldorf teachers in the Friedwart school, one of the first Steiner school back in the 1920s. Their purpose was to help develop the students’ feeling for these hidden forces through painting. The seven motifs in this series provide a pathway to understanding the invisible forces that underlie all living entities: nature, human, cosmos.

‘Sunlit tree by a waterfall‘ (feature motif), which encompasses all four elements, is my favourite of the sequence. The variations seen below are watercolour on a black background, as a mural in a living room, a veil painting, a pastel and two dynamic pictures employing the metamorphic water and air qualities so aptly described by Theodor Schwenk in his water studies.

Below are two more motifs of sketches from the series, Trees in Sunny Air and Trees in Storm.

Trees are like the lungs of the earth, breathing between the condensed ground and the expansive skies. In this motif, we can see changes in atmospheric pressure, when the ordered canopies are blown into chaos and the dynamics of moving air forms becomes apparent in the disordered forms of the foliage.

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By contrasts, in these two tree motifs from the Nine series: Blossoming/Fruiting Trees and Summer Trees, we see quite different processes at work in the changing of the trees from within as they move through the cycle of the year.

Like the Nine Training Sketches, the Seven School Sketches explores processes in Nature rather than their physical representation. They are not intended to be naturalistic, but expressive, not so much of the artist, but of the dynamics of Nature. In this way, both artist and viewer becomes more awake to the ‘becoming’ and ‘dying away’ cycles of movement, change, flow and ebb taking place invisibly, continually around us. However, unlike the Nine series, the sequence in the Seven leads us from Nature to Human to Cosmos.

Other sketches in the Seven series include a sunrise/sunset, a head sketch and a Madonna sketch, examples of which can be seen here.

Both series form a part of an ongoing research process that trains the soul ‘configuration’ of the artist through their repeated practice, through immersion into the themes again and again. Although these motifs aim to reflect the inner ‘stimmung’ and processes of archetypal Nature forms, it is impossible not to imbue them with something of the soul mood of the environment in which the artist lives, in my case, the Australian landscape.

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