From Colour to Form

From Colour to Form: A Glimpse into Gerard Wagner’s Approach to Rudolf Steiner’s Indications for Painting

This book offers insight into how Gerard Wagner developed his work on the basis of Rudolf Steiner’s indications for painting. Fundamental color experiments illustrate his methodical approach, while examples of his late work show the living, etheric quality he achieved in his watercolor painting. In appreciation of Rudolf Steiner’s contribution toward the evolution of painting, Wagner wrote the following:

“Whoever attempts to tread this path can come to the conviction that the indications of Rudolf Steiner, if they are sufficiently penetrated and experienced, can lead one to grasp the creative formative forces of color and to create within this life element without harming it. By giving us such pictures of life shaped by color, Rudolf Steiner has set goals for a far future of painting.”

All of Rudolf Steiner’s training sketches for painters (pastel drawings and watercolors) are included in the book, as well as the first English translation of the summaries by Albert Steffen of Rudolf Steiner’s lectures on color.

C O N T E N T S:

PART ONE

Introduction
Beginnings—Rudolf Steiner’s Indications
• The Training Sketches
Experimenting with Colour
Life in Colour
Motifs arising from the Training Sketches
• Plant Life
• Animals
• The Human Being (Head Study, Mother and Child)|
Cupola Motifs (from the Large Cupola)

PART TWO

Gerard Wagner’s Approach to Balance in Painting
• Goetheanum Form-motifs and Inner Balance
• The Sense of Balance and the Sense of Life
• Colour Measuring
A New Art

APPENDIX

The “Colour Lectures”—Summaries by Albert Steffen of Lectures given by Rudolf Steiner
The Training Sketches
References
List of plates

About the Author

Caroline Chanter was born in 1950 in Singapore and was educated in England. After schooling at Michael Hall, Sussex, she studied art at Exeter Art College in Devon and afterwards at Leeds Polytechnic in Yorkshire. Later, she graduated from the Margarethe Hauschka School for Artistic Therapy in Germany and, in 1983, joined the Anthroposophical Medical Practice in Forest Row, concurrently teaching at Tobias School of Art in East Grinstead, Sussex. Between 1993 and 1999 she was one of Gerard Wagner’s pupils at the Goetheanum Painting School. She now teaches at the Rudolf Steiner Painting School in Dornach, Switzerland, and at Swaasthyakala Niketan, a painting therapy school in Bangalore, India.