The Philosophy of Freedom

This year we are studying the Philosophy of Freedom by Rudolf Steiner. Each week we will be doing artistic exercises in relation to the text. Here are a few samples from our first session on the prefaces.

Beginning our 6th year

We started the year with a short block focused on learning to see through drawing. Here are some samples of the student's work.

Color Exercises from Fall 2013

 

October 2013... The School Year Has Begun!

The Free Columbia 2013 - 2014 year has begun. Already three weeks in, we have completed quite a bit of work, as depicted in the photos below. Plenty of time has been spent outdoors doing nature observation, first through black and white sketches and eventually in color pastel. We have done simple exercises that have taken us out of "realism" yet at the same time encourage us to really "look" at what we're seeing. 

DRAWING IN THE LANDSCAPE

 GEOTHEAN COLOR STUDIES

Here we each painted a red circle using the same paint. After staring at each of our own circles, everyone experienced another color circle when they switched their gaze to a white sheet of paper. Then we each mixed paint to match the "after image" we each experienced through staring at the red circle. This confirmed that we all experienced another color through this exercise, and that our colors were fairly similar. If you're not sure what this means exactly, a new blog will be posted shortly with some of the exercises.

We also experimented in finding the after image of a human being.

 It is hard WORK trying to match these after images.
Especially when looking at two similar shades of blue.

Here we have our full color chart. The primaries (2 blues, 2 yellows and 2 red/pink) were the colors we painted from the tubes. The remaining colors were the ones we experienced as the after image. Each person contributed one color circle to each color group, so as you can see, our "compliment" colors (orange, violet, etc...) are all quite similar.

GENERAL PAINTING COLOR COURSE 

Experiencing the Geothen Color Wheel through a simple wet-on-wet painting exercise. We are currently working on larger scale layered water color paintings with this exercise, and these will be shown later as they progress much more slowly.

Some of what's to come in our color notebooks... 

Color exercises from nature observation, taking us out of realism. Here we were only allowed to use three colors, choosing at least one we didn't like, and preferably ones that were not commonly seen outside.