Lecture III
The Phenomenon of Colour in Material Nature
We have differentiated colours in that out of their own nature we have
got black, white, green and peach-colour as images, and from
this pictorial character of colours we had to differentiate what I
called the luminous nature of colours which we meet in blue, yellow and
red. And we saw that just these colours, blue, yellow and red, possess
what I might call certain properties of will, by reason of their being
luminous. As you know, one perceives a colour as a so-called colour of
the spectrum, such as we see in the rainbow, and we perceive colour in
solid bodies. And we know also that we must make use of bodies as
painting-colours, their bodily composition, mixture, etc., if we want
to practice the art of colour which is painting. Here we are brought to
the important question, the answer to which in the state of
present-day knowledge, is nowhere to be found, the question namely:
What is the relation of colour as such, which we have got to know as
something volatile and fleeting, either as image or luster, to solid
body, to matter? What makes matter as such appear to us coloured? Those
who have looked into Goethe's
Theory of Colour,
will perhaps know that there, this question is not touched upon, from a
certain intellectual honesty of Goethe, because from the means at his
disposal he simply was not capable of getting as far as the problem —
how is colour applied to solid matter? Moreover this is a question, in the
highest sense, for the Art of Painting. For in painting we practice
this phenomenon, at any rate for the purpose of outward appearance. We
apply colour and through its application we try to call forth the
impression of something painted. So, if we want to raise the study of
the nature of colour to the plane of painting, we must be interested in
this coloured appearance of material nature. Now since in recent times
the physicists of colour have regarded the theory of colour as a part of
Optics, we find also explanations of the colour of solids worthy of the
new physics. We find, for example, the characteristic explanation of
the question, Why is a body red? A body is red because it absorbs all
other colours and reflects only red. This is the explanation so
characteristic of the new Physics, for it is based approximately on
the logical formula: Why is a man stupid? He is stupid because he
absorbs all cleverness and radiates only stupidity outwards. If one
applies this logical principle so common in colour-theory everywhere to
the rest of life, you see what interesting things result. He pursued
his problem as far as his means allowed him. Then he stopped in front
of the question: How is matter coloured?
Now let us recall how we first got the pictorial character of the
first four colours we dealt with. We saw that we there have a property
which produces on a medium its shadow or its image. We saw how the
living forms its image or shadow in the lifeless and how thereby green
results. We saw then how the psychic forms its image in the living and
produces thereby peach-colour. We saw how the spiritual forms its image
in the psychic, and thereby white is the result, and finally how the
lifeless reflects its image or shadow in the spiritual and produces
black.
There we have all the colours which have a pictorial or image
character. The rest have the luster or luminous character. The
pictorial character we meet most visibly in the objective world is
green. Black and white are to a certain extent frontier-colours and are
for this reason no more regarded as colours. Peach-colour, we have seen,
is to be understood really only in movement. So that green is the most
typical. And this would be the colour applied to the external world,
or, as we say, applied to the Vegetable Kingdom. And so in the
Vegetable Kingdom we have expressed the real origin of applied colour
as image. Now it is a question perhaps of examining this vegetable
green in order to find the character, the essence of green. And here
we must enlarge the problem contrary to what is usually recognized
today.
We know from our
Occult Science
that the Vegetable Kingdom was
formed during the previous metamorphosis-condition of our earth. But
we also know that at that time there was as yet no solid matter. We
know it has been transformed during the evolution of our earth, and
must have been made, during the evolution of the old moon, in a fluid
state, for there existed nothing solid then. We can speak of colour
matter floating in this fluid and permeating it. It need not be
attached to anything, or at the most, to the surface. Only on the
surface does the fluid matter tend to become solid. And so, if we look
back at this stage of evolution, we might say: in the formation of
vegetation we have to do with a fluid green, or, in act, with fluid
colour-matter, and with something that is really a fluid element. And
plants — as you can see in my
Occult Science
— could not have assumed their firm shape, could not have put on
their mineral form, till the period of earth-evolution. It is possible
that something was formed in vegetation which made it definite, and not
fluid. So that what we call plants first appeared during the formation
of the earth. It was then that colour must have taken on the character
in plants such as we perceive today; it was then that it became a
permanent green.
Now a plant does not wear only this green — at least
generally, — for you are aware how a plant in the course of its
metamorphosis merges into other colours, as a plant has yellow, blue or
red flowers, and as a green fruit — take for example, a melon,
merges into yellow. A superficial observation shows you what is at
work there when a plant takes on a colour other than green. When this
happens — you can easily prove it — the sun is essential to the
circumstances connected with the growth of these other colours, — direct
sunlight. Just consider how plants, if they cannot hold up their
flowers to the sunlight, in fact hide themselves, curl up, etc. And we
shall find a connection, — superficially a connection, — between the
absence of green colour in certain plant parts and the sun. The sun
metamorphoses, one might say, the green. It brings the green to
another condition. If we bring the manifold colouring of vegetation
into relation with a heavenly body — as already said, in a
superficial study — we shall not find it difficult to consult the
statements of
Occult Science,
and to ask: What has it, from its observations, to say concerning possible
other relationships of coloured plant-life to the stars?
And here we have to ask ourselves the question: What kind of starry
phenomenon is of the greatest effect on earth? What heavenly body is
there whose influence would be contrary to the sun's, and could
produce that in plant-nature which sunlight as it were metamorphoses,
destroys, changes to other colours? What is there that can produce the
green in the vegetable world?
We arrive at that particular heavenly body which represents the
polaric opposite of the sun, namely the moon. And Spiritual Science
can establish the connection between the green of plants and this
moon-nature (I will only just mention the subject today) as well as
one can establish the connection of the rest of plant-life, with the
sun. This it does by pointing to the properties of moonlight as
opposed to sunlight, and above all, by pointing out how moon-light
influences sun-darkness. If we consider vegetation, we get an
interplay of lunar and solar influences. But at the same time we get
an explanation why green becomes an image, and why green in plants is
not luminous like the other colours. The other colours in plants are
lustrous. They have a shiny character. Just look with proper
understanding at the colour of flowers; they shine at one.
Compare it with the green. It is “fixed” to the plant. You
see in it nothing else but a copy of what you perceive in the Cosmos.
Sunlight shines; moonlight is the pictorial image of sunlight. Thus
you find again the image (or shadow, Ed.) of light, colour as the image
of light, in the green of plants. And you have in the plant through
the sun the colour of the luster. And you have the colour of the
“fixation”; the colour of the image in the green. These
things cannot be understood with the clumsy ideas of Physics. They
have to be brought into the region of feeling and must be realized
with spiritual sensibility. Then you automatically get what we have
understood in this way, the transition into Art. Physics, with its
clumsy methods of approaching the world of colour, has driven all
artistic considerations from its study. So that actually the artist
has not the least idea what to make of what Physics has to say
concerning it.
But if we regard the colour of plants in such a way that we know that
cosmic forces play a part, that we have in the colour-formation of
plants a conjunction of solar and lunar forces, we then have the first
element by which we can understand how colour is attached to an object,
at any rate primarily to a vegetable object, how it becomes an
embodied colour. It becomes a embodied colour because it is not the
luster which works on it cosmically, but already the image as such. In
the plant we have to deal with that green which becomes an image
because at one time in the evolution of the earth the moon was
separated from this earth. In this separation we must see the real
origin of the green in the vegetable world. Because of it the plant
can no longer be exposed to the equivalent of lunar forces on the
earth, but receives its image-character direct from the Cosmos.
Our feeling is well acquainted with this cosmic interchange of
relations in respect of vegetation, and if we question our feeling we
shall be able to approach this character of green and other colours
from this world of feeling by means of an artistic appreciation of the
nature of colours. It is, you see, something peculiar. If you go back
in the history of painting you will find that the great painters of
former ages paint people and human situations, but seldom paint
external nature, in so far as it consists of plant-life. You can of
course also easily find the explanation for it; that in older times it
was not so usual to observe nature and that therefore one did not
paint it. But that of course is only a superficial explanation, though
people today are easily satisfied with such superficial explanations.
What lies behind it is different. Landscape painting arises really at
that time in which materialism and intellectualism grip mankind, in
which an abstract nature acquires more and more power over human
civilization and culture. You may say that landscape painting is in
fact a product of the last three or four centuries. If you take this
into consideration you will have to say to yourself: only in the last
three or four centuries has man reached a state of soul which enables
him to comprehend the element necessary for painting nature in
landscape. Why? If you look at the pictures of old times, we shall
conclude that all these pictures have a quite definite character.
Precisely if we differentiate (we will discuss it more exactly) in
colour between the image-character and the luster-character, we find
that the old artists did not make this distinction in their painting.
And they paid no attention, as we had to do yesterday, to this inner
will-nature of colour-luster. The old painters do not always take into
consideration that yellow demands a shadowy edge. They take it into
consideration when they carry their painting more into the spiritual;
but not when they paint the everyday world. Nor did they pay attention
to what we demanded of blue; possibly rather more so with red. You can
see this in certain pictures by Leonardo, and also in others, for
example, by Titian. But in general we can say that the old painters do
not make this distinction between image and luster in the nature of
colours. Why? They stand in a different relationship to the world of
colours; they grasp what is luster in colour-nature. They grasp what is
image and give it in painting an image-character. But if you give
image-character to what in the world of colours is luster, if you have
turned everything in the nature of colours into image, then you cannot
paint a landscape of plants.
Why not?
Now suppose you want to paint a landscape of plant-life, and it is to
give a real impression of life, you have to paint the plants
themselves as well in their green as in their individual colours rather
darker than they really are. You must make a green surface, in any
case darker than it is. You must also make the red or yellow
plant-life darker than reality. But then, after you have got your
colour in this way in image-character, rather darker than it really is,
you must cover the whole with an atmosphere, and this atmosphere must
in a certain way be yellowish-white. You must get the whole in a
yellowish-white light, and only then you get in the right manner what
a plant really is. You have to paint a glow over the image; and
therefore you must cross over to the luster-character of colour; you
must have its luster-character.
And I would ask you to look, from this point of view, at the whole
effort of modern landscape painting, look how it has tried to get more
and more at the secret of painting vegetation. If you paint it as it
is out there, you don't get there. The picture does not create the
impression of life. It does this only if you paint the trees, etc.
darker in their colour than they are, and pour over them the
glow, something yellowish-white, that is luminous. Because the
old masters did not cultivate the painting of this glow, of this
lit-up atmosphere, they could not paint a landscape at all.
You notice particularly in painting towards the end of the nineteenth
century, how they sought the means to comprehend landscape. Open air
painting, all sorts of things have cropped up in order to comprehend
landscape. They do it only if they resolve to paint the Vegetable
Kingdom darker in its separate shades and then to cover it with the
gleaming yellowish-white. Of course you must do this according to
colour-composition, etc. Then you succeed really in painting on the
canvas, or any other surface, something that gives you the impression
of life. It is a matter of sensibility, and this sensibility leads you
to paint in something that floods it as the expression of the shining
Cosmos, of that which descends out f the universe on to earth as
luster. In no other way can you get behind the secret of plant-life,
that is, of nature clothed in vegetation.
If you obey this law, you will also realize that everything painting
seeks to achieve must also be sought in the nature of colours itself.
What are in fact the media of painting? You have the surface, canvas
or paper or what not, and on the surface you have to fix in pictorial
form what is there. But if something refuses to be fixed in pictorial
form, such as plant-nature, you must at least pour over it the
luster-character.
Observe, we have not yet reached the different coloured mineral
substances, the lifeless objects. In this case particularly it is
necessary to understand the matter with sensibility. The world of
colour cannot be captured with the reason; we must apply our
sensibility, and now I ask you to reflect if there is anything in the
nature of colour itself which raises the question, when you are
painting, something inorganic, i.e. walls or some other inanimate
objects: is there any need to understand whatever you are painting
from the colour itself? There is a strong necessity; for think
for a moment what is tolerable and what is intolerable. You agree,
don't you, that if I paint a black table on a white ground, that is
quite tolerable. If I paint a blue table — just imagine a room full
of furniture painted blue — if you have any artistic feeling, you
would find it intolerable. Equally impossible is a room with yellow or
red furniture, that is a painted room. You can, as I've said,
paint a black table on a white ground, it is purely a drawing, but you
can do it; in fact, one can put directly upon paper or canvas only
something whereby the inorganic, the inanimate is to result, which at
first has image-character in its colour. So we have to ask generally:
What do the colours black, white, green and peach allow to inanimate
objects? You must get from the colour what can be painted. And then it
always results that when you paint according to the colour, that is the
colour which is also an image, you still have not got the inanimate
object. You would have only the image — the colour is already that.
You would not evoke the representation of the chair, you would have
the image of it, if you had to paint it purely from a colour which is
image.
So what must you do? You must try to give the image when you are
painting still-life, the character of the luster. That is the point.
You have to give the colours that have image-character, black, white,
green and peach-colour, inner illumination, that is, luster-character.
And then you can combine what you have thus vivified with the other
lusters, with blue and yellow and red. So you must strip those colours
of the image-character they have, and give them luster-character;
which means that the painter, if he paints still-life, must really
always bear in mind that a certain source of light, a dull source of
light lies in the things themselves. He must so to speak think of his
canvas or his paper as in a certain sense luminant. Here he requires
on his surface the glow of the light which he has to paint on it. If
he paints inanimate objects, he must bear in mind, he must contain in
his mental make-up the idea, that a kind of illumination underlies
inanimate objects, that in a way his surface is transparent and emits
lights from within.
Now you see we arrive at the point in painting where in applying the
colour, in conjuring the colour on to the surface, we must give the
colour the character of reflecting light; otherwise we are not
painters. If we always strive more and more to produce a painting out
of the colour itself, as after all later human development demands, we
shall have to pursue this attempt further and further; namely to get
to the root of the essential nature of colour, so as to compel a colour,
if it is an image colour, to return and take on again its
luster-character, to make it inwardly luminous. If we paint it
otherwise, we get no endurable painting of inanimate nature. A wall
which is not covered with paint so as to have this inward light is, as
a painting, no wall, but only the image of one. We must bring the
colours to glow inwardly, and thereby in a certain sense, they become
mineralized. Therefore we shall have more and more to find a way of
not painting from the palette, smearing the material colour on to the
surface, for then we shall never be able to evoke the inner light in
the right way, but of painting form the pot (tiegel); we shall
have to paint only with that colour which has got the green of
liquid because it is watery, (i.e. with liquid colours, Ed.) And
generally speaking an inartistic element has been introduced into
painting with the palette. Painting from the palette is materialistic,
a failure to understand the inner nature of colour which, as such, is
really never absorbed by the material body, but lives in it, and must
proceed from it. Therefore, when I put it on the surface, I must make
it shine.
You are aware that in our building we have tried to bring out this
light by using vegetable colours which can most easily be made to
develop this inner glow. Any one who has feeling for these things will
see how coloured minerals, in different degrees, it is true, show this
inner light which we attempt to conjure up when we want to paint a
mineral. When we want to paint a mineral according to its colour, we
learn to look at it not as a model, naturalistically, but, as is
necessary, as in the act of giving light from inside. Now, how does a
mineral proceed to give light inwardly? If we have the coloured
mineral, its colour appears to us because it is in sunlight. Sunlight
in this case does much less than in the case of plants. In plants
sunlight conjures up all the colours which occur besides green. In a
coloured mineral, or any inanimate coloured object the effect of
sunlight is that in the dark, when all cats are grey or black, we do
not see the colours; it simply makes the colours visible. But the reason
for the colour is, after all, inside. Why? How does it get there? Here
we arrive again at the problem from which we started today.
Now, to lead you to the green of plants, I have had to point out to
you the breaking away of the moon, as you find it described in my
Occult Science.
Now I must point out to you the other similar
events, which have taken place in the course of the earth's evolution.
If you follow what I have explained in my Occult Science concerning
the earth's development, you will find that those universal bodies
which surround the earth and belong to its planetary system, were, as
you know, in connection with the whole terrestrial planet; they were
torn away just as the moon was. Of course that in itself is connected
with the sun. But, generally speaking, if we look simply at the earth,
we can regard this as an exodus. Observe that the internal colouring of
inanimate objects is connected with this departure of the other
planets. Solids become coloured, because the earth is freed from those
forces which she had while the planets were tied to her, and they
effect her from out of the Cosmos, and thereby evoke the inner force
of the Cosmos in the coloured mineral bodies. This is, in fact, exactly
what the minerals get from the forces which are no more there, but now
shed their influence from out of the Cosmos. We see it is a much more
hidden occult matter than with the plants' green. But here we have
something which just because it is hidden, goes much deeper into its
nature and therefore includes not only living vegetation but also the
lifeless mineral. And so we are brought — I am only mentioning it
here — if we are to consider the colouring of solids, to something
of which modern Physics takes no account. We are brought to the
workings of the Cosmos. We cannot explain the colouration of inanimate
things in any way if we do not know that this is connected with what
the terrestrial bodies have retained as inner forces since the other
planets have been removed from the earth.
For instance, we explain the reddish colour in some mineral or other by
means of the earth's connection with some planet, for example, with
Mars or Mercury; a mineral yellow, by means of the earth's connection
with Jupiter or Venus, and so on. For this reason the colouration of
mineral swill always remain a riddle until we come to think of the
earth in conjunction with the extra-terrestrial bodies in the Cosmos.
If we turn to living things, we must turn to sun and moonlight, and
thus come to the one green surface colour, and to the surface colours
which later become luster and luminosity emitted by the plant. But if
we wish to understand that particular light that confronts us from the
inside of substances, that element of the otherwise fluctuating
spectrum which is constant inside solid bodies, we must remember that
at one time what is now cosmic was in the interior of the earth and is
thus the origin of those heavy elements in the earth's composition
which are more or less liquid. We have to look outside the earth for
the origin of what lies hidden under the surface of minerals. That is
the essential thing. The surface of the earth admits of an easier
terrestrial explanation than what lies under it, which requires an
extra-terrestrial explanation. And thus the mineral component parts of
our earth flash out at us in those colours which they have retained
from the elements which have left the earth for the planets. And these
colours remain under the influence of the corresponding planets of the
cosmic environment.
This is the reason why, when we apply the lifeless paint to a surface
we must, as it were, get the light behind the surface, we must
spiritualize the surface and create a secret inner radiance. I mean,
we must try to get the downward-streaming planetary influence
behind the surface on which we paint the picture, so that the
painting gives us organically the impression of the essential, not
merely of the pictorial, and so it will depend on imparting the
spiritual to the colours, in order to paint inanimate nature. But how
to do it?
Recall the scheme which I have given you, in which I said: black is
the image of the lifeless in the spiritual. We create the spiritual
according to the luster and paint in it the lifeless. And in so far as
we colour it, and convert it completely to a luster, we wake its
essence. This is in fact the process which must be adopted for the
painting of inanimate things.
And now you will find that we can ascend again to the Animal Kingdom.
If you want to paint a landscape in which the Animal Kingdom is
especially conspicuous, you have something which works as
follows — it can be grasped only with your feeling. If you want to
introduce animals into your landscape, you must paint their colour
rather lighter than reality, and you must spread over it a soft bluish
light. Suppose you were painting red animals — rather a rare
occurrence — you would have to have a soft bluish sheen over them,
and everywhere where you had the animal and the vegetation together,
you would have to blend the yellowish sheen into the bluish one.
You would have to base this blending on the points of conjunction and
then you get the possibility of painting the animal nature, otherwise
it will always give the impression of inanimate representation. So
that we may say that when we paint inanimate nature, it must be all
luster, it must gleam from inside. When we paint the living
plant-life, it must appear as luster-image. We first paint the image,
and in fact paint so dark that we deviate from the natural colour. We
present the image-character, in fact, by painting rather darker, and
then overspreading it with luster, luster-image.
If we paint creatures with souls and even animals, we must paint the
image-luster. We must not go straight to the complete picture. This we
achieve by painting lighter, that is, by leading the image over to the
luster, and adding on top that which in a certain sense dulls the pure
transparency. Thus we get the image-luster.
And if we go to a step up to human beings, we must aspire to paint the
pure image.
Inanimate: |
|
Luster |
Vegetable: |
|
Luster-image |
Soul-animal: |
|
Image-luster |
Spiritual, man: |
|
Image |
This is what those painters have done who have not yet painted
external Nature, they have merely created the pure image. And thus we
come to the complete image; that is, we must now include those colours
which we have met in pictures as lusters. That happens because we
deprive them in a sense of their luster-character when we get to human
beings; we treat them as images. This means we paint the surface
anyhow and try somehow to find a reason for it. The yellow surface
insists on being, as it were, washed out at the edge. In no other way
is it permissible to have the yellow, it must be washed out at the
edge. In a painting of human beings, one can remove its real
colour-nature and convert it into an image. In this way one transforms
the luster-colour into colour and thereby reaches the human; when one
paints a human being one need worry about nothing except the pure
transparency of the medium.
It is true one must develop most particularly the feeling for what
colour becomes after its transition into image-character. You see, one
penetrates in fact the whole nature of colour — also in so far as
this nature is expressed in painting — if one cultivates a
sensibility to the difference between the pictorial and that which is
to be found in luster. The pictorial really more nearly approaches the
quality of thought, and the more so, the further we proceed in the
pictorial. When we paint a man, we can really paint only our thoughts
of him. But this thought of him must be made evident. It must be
expressed in the colour. And one lives in the colour when one is, for
example, in a position to introduce somewhere a yellow surface and to
say to oneself: this ought really to be shaded off; I transform it
into image, and I must therefore modify it where it touches
neighboring colours. I must apologize, as it were, in my picture that I
do not yield to the will of the yellow.
Thus you see how in fact it is possible to paint from the colour
itself; how it is possible to regard the world of colour as such as
something which so develops in the procession of our earth's evolution
that colour first irradiates the earth as light from the Cosmo; and
then, since something in the earth departs from it and returns again
as radiation, colour becomes incorporated in the object. And we follow
this experience in colour — this cosmic experience, and attain
thereby the possibility of ourselves living in the colour. It is living
in the colour, when I have it dissolved in the pot, and by dipping the
brush in it an applying it to the surface, transform it into something
fixed and firm; whereas it is not living in the colour if I stand there
with a palette and mix colours together, if, having the colours already
solid and material on the palette, I then daub them on the surface.
That is not living in the colour, but outside it. I live in the colour
only when I must translate it from a fluid to a solid condition. Then
I experience in a sense the same that the colour itself has
experienced, in developing from the former lunar condition to the
terrestrial condition and there becoming solid; for a solid can arise
only with the earth. And then again there is this in my relation with
colour. My soul must live with colour. I must rejoice with yellow, feel
the dignity or seriousness of red; I must share with blue its soft, I
might almost say, its tearful mood, I must be able to spiritualize
colour, if I want to bring it to inner capabilities. I may not paint
without this spiritual understanding for colour, especially not
inorganic or lifeless objects This does not mean that one is to paint
symbolically, that one must unfold the quite inartistic; this colour
means one thing and that means another. The point is not that colours
signify something other than themselves; but that one will be able to
live with the colour.
Living with the colour ceased when one left the pot colour for the
palette colour and because of this change we have all the tailors'
dummies which are painted by the portrait-painters from time to time
on their respective canvases. They are dolls, dummies and so forth;
there is nothing real, nothing with an inner impulse of life, which
can be painted only if one understands what living with the colour is.
Such are the few remarks I wanted to make to you in these three
addresses. Naturally they could be enlarged endlessly, and this can be
done at another opportunity in the future. For the present I wanted
only to make these few remarks, and to provide a transition to such
studies.
One hears very often, after all, that artists have a proper fear of
everything scientific, that they refuse to let knowledge or science
interfere in their Art. Goethe already — although he could not get
to the inner causes of colouration, still produced the elements of
it — rightly said on the subject of this fear in painters: Up till
now one has found in painters a fear and a decided antipathy towards
all theoretic studies on colour and what belongs to it, with which one
cannot reproach them, for till now the so-called theories were
groundless, vacillating and tending to empiricism. We should like our
efforts to do something to calm this fear and help to stimulate
artists to put to practical proof the laws as laid down.
If one proceeds in the right way consciously, one's knowledge becomes
raised from the abstract to the concrete in Art, and this is
particularly the case with such a fluctuating element as in the world
of colour. And it is only the fault of the decadence of our Science
that artists rightly have such a fear of theory. This theory is
material-intellectual, especially this theory that we come across in
modern physical Optics. The element of colour is fluctuating, and the
most one can wish is that the painter should not solidify his colour as
he does on the palette, but should leave it in a fluid state in the
pot. But if the physicist comes along then and draws his lines on the
board and says that from his strokes and lines run out here the
yellow, there blue — this attitude is enough to drive one mad. That
has nothing to do with Physics. Physics must be content with the light
that is in the room. You cannot undertake the consideration of colour
at all without first lifting it into the region of the soul. For it is
sheer nonsense to say: Colour is something subjective which produces an
effect on us And if one goes further and says, — and in doing so one
conceives an inexact picture of the Ego — that there is some
external objective inclination which affects us, our Ego, it is
rubbish; the Ego itself is in the colour. The Ego and the human astral
body are not to be differentiated from colour, they live in it and are
outside the physical human body in proportion as they are bound up
with colour out there; they only reproduce the colours in the physical
and etheric body. That is the point. So that the whole question of the
effect of an objective on a subjective colour is nonsense; for the Ego,
the astral body, already exist in the colour, and they enter with it.
Colour is the conveyer of the Ego and the astral body into the physical
and into the etheric body. So that the whole method of study must come out.
Thus everything which has crept into Physics, and which Physics
includes in its diagrammatic lines, must come out. There should first
of all be a period in which one abstains altogether from drawing, when
one speaks of colour in a discussion on Physics; but one should try to
understand colour in its fluctuation, in its life.
That is the important thing. Then you pass of your own accord from the
theoretical to the artistic. Then you produce a method of studying
colour which the painter can understand; because, if he identifies
himself with such a method, and lives wholly in it, it is then no
theoretical process of thought, but an element in colour itself. And,
since he lives in the colour, he receives from it each time the answer
to the question: How am I going to apply it?
Hence the possibility of conducting a dialogue with colours, for they
tell you themselves how they want to be applied on the surface. It is
this which makes a line of approach aspiring to attain reality enter
the sphere of Art. Our Physics had ruined it for us; and therefore it
must be emphasized today with all distinctness that such things which
above all verge on Psychology and Aesthetics must not be allowed to be
further corrupted by the physical view, but that it must be understood
that quite another way and method must be employed. We see the
spiritual and psychic elements in Goetheanism, which must be carried
further. It has not yet, for instance, shown the differentiation of
colours into images and lusters. We have to live Goetheanism
thoughtfully, in order to proceed further and further. And this we can
do only through Spiritual Science.
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