Lecture Series
ART AS A SPIRITUAL PRACTICE – AND WHY WE NEED THIS
What can art do for us? The Arts are well known as a form of pleasurable activity that encourages creativity and supports our health and wellbeing colour, music, plays, inspiring films and beautiful pictures. But practised in a structured, disciplined yet imaginative way, art, any of the Arts, can act as meditation does – as a schooling path of spiritual development. Art approached in this way can ‘configure’ our fourfold being with dynamic, breathing balance, strengthening and ordering our soul forces so that our ‘I’ stands ready to meet the increasingly uncertain challenges of our times.
Indeed, becoming artistic is an inner need of Anthroposophy. Without the artistic element, Steiner tells us, Anthroposophy cannot go into the future, for it will go ‘short of breath’.
This webinar also overviews the new Art as a Path of Schooling for the Soul training.
Art as Revelation, as Transformation
The word ‘revelation’ comes from ‘reveal’ or ‘to lay bare’. the reveal of a truth, a spiritual reality, a moment of revelatory significance. ‘Revelation’ in art usually denotes some sort of spiritual or religious experience when viewing art in a gallery, watching a play or listening to music. But in the life of an artist or viewer of art, a revelation can also be a breakthrough experience to a until-now hidden understanding of an artistic impulse or themselves or the world itself, beyond the everyday mundane. Such revelations in our artistic practice or in viewing art can lead to self transformation but also to see the purpose and role of art in the world in a completely new way.
This webinar looks at the nature of revelation, of thresholds, of breakthrough experiences in artistic contexts and how they can be signposts on a path of transformation.
This lecture is part of the Art as a Spiritual Practice series, in Art as a Path of Schooling for the Soul.
27 JUNE 2024
Living Into The Becoming World: About Rudolf Steiner’s Training Sketches For The Painters
Instead of living in the now – how do we even do this? – learn to see the world, experience the world as constantly becoming and dying away. It brings everything into movement with us, makes our think more flexible, like water, like a plant. Brings us more deeply into connection with the ever- changing world of nature.
Goethe invites us to step into nature, to participate, not stand back and observe “Becoming” in philosophy explores the process of change, transformation, and evolution. It reflects that everything in existence is in a constant state of flux, transitioning from one state to another over time. In other words, becoming is about the dynamic nature of reality.
This lecture is part of the Art as a Spiritual Practice series, in Art as a Path of Schooling for the Soul.
13 FEBRUARY 2025
Colour, space and evolving consciousness
Did people of the past see the world as we do? Despite the great changes we can observe over thousands of years from archeaology, art and cultural studies, we tend to assume human beings themselves haven’t changed much. But is this a false assumption?
What if our ancestors literally saw the world differently to us – and how would we know? Well, we know, for example, from Aristotle’s surviving literature that the rainbow was once described as being red, yellow, black and white; and that the ancient Greeks did not perceive the colour blue in the way we do today, but rather as a veil over darkness, according Homer. Were they just being poetic?
Rudolf Steiner, amongst others, suggests not, that indeed our very perception of the world around us has changed dramatically, including our perception of colour. If we did not always see seven colours in the rainbow, what changed that we see them now? And according to Steiner, there are still five colours we do not yet fully perceive.
Our spiritual history can be studied in light of this understanding: colour perception as a picture of our changing, evolving states of consciousness. This lecture dives into this topic, using literary texts and illustrations from the past to support this argument, and examines what implications this has for our understanding of consciousness in general.
This webinar is part of a series for Waldorf teachers on the background to Waldorf pedagogy and is part of the Art as a Spiritual Practice series, in Art as a Path of Schooling for the Soul.
DATE 12 JUNE 2025
Beyond Steiner – inner indications for our times and future
The threat of AI ‘creativity’ is perhaps the single greatest challenge to the Arts in our current age. We face the falsity of AI-generated images that lack ‘soul’ and increasingly immersive technologies that can conjure virtual realities that are like waking dreams, disconnecting people from the earthly world, and thus hindering humanity’s earthly mission to take hold and transform the material substance of the earth ourselves. These undermine our sense of what is human, what it means to be human, and what does not.
Lecture given on 18 November at Inner Impulses and the State of our Times Conference of the Sektion für Bildende Künste/Visual Arts Section, 17-19 November 2023.
18 NOVEMBER 2023
The Luciferic and Ahrimanic impulses in art and in modern cultural life
We are familiar with the figures of Lucifer and Ahriman as portrayed in Rudolf Steiner’s the Representative of Humanity. There, both beings are held in balance by the Christ. Yet in daily life, it is the spectre of Ahriman that shadows us continually, through our engagement with technologies that both ease and complicate everyday tasks. Steiner describes this dual principle as an inescapable tragedy for the modern soul. So how can we grapple with this? In the motifs that filled the ceiling of the first Goetheanum, we find some answers.
Webinar from The Great Luciferic/Ahrimanic Face-off series, September-November2022
24 SEPTEMBER 2022
Painted Space 