summer courses

Color Course July 2010

End of the Year Exhibition

Our first year is over. It has been very successful. On May 26 we opened our end of the year exhibition at Raising Matter (www.raisingmatter.org) in Hudson NY. On May 28 we had our graduation celebration for our 3 full time students, Kristin Dalton, Laurel Iselin and Karin Heide Weinrich. When we closed the show on May 30 over 100 people had visited to see the work.

We are looking forward to our next year which will begin in September 2010. If you are interested in Free Columbia please contact us at freecolumbiaart@gmail.com

Impressionism

Impressionism

 

            Our normal experience of life is fragmentary, the world is broken into obscurity.  The immediate impressions I meet leave me thinking, making sense and speculating; they leave me unsatisfied.  The work of art is the mysterious corner of the world where the fragment has become a whole.  While I am in beauty I lack nothing, I desire nothing.  To take fragments from peripheral facets of a half visible whole and to lift them to beauty is the activity of Impressionism.  We pursued this work through pastel work and poetry in the landscape.  

image colors

image colors: green, white, black and peach blossom.

What mystery lies here?

We spent 4 weeks getting to know these colors, their moods, their inclinations, by painting them in many different ways. 

Here are our experiments.

New Book - 52 Weeks

52 Weeks - by Laura Summer

Drawing and Painting with the "Calendar of the Soul" by Rudolf Steiner

$35 plus $3.50 shipping

to order contact us at freecolumbiaart@gmail.com

Introduction

 

This book is a workbook. It is designed not to be read but to be drawn and by being drawn, to provide an experience of the cycle of the year.

 

As modern people we live with very little relationship to the cycle of the year. Central heat and cooling, electric lights and modern transportation allow us to be fairly comfortable in any season and therefore unconscious of the great breathing cycle of the earth. The verses of Rudolf Steiner’s Calendar of the Soul provide a meditative path for experiencing this cycle. The exercises in this book were developed in relation to these verses but this is not a book of illustrations. Rather by drawing or painting them, the artistic exercises are designed to provide the student with an experience of inner movement during the year; the breathing in of the earth in winter, the out breathing into summer and the subtle variations, spirals, reversals and lemniscates of the process.

 

When I first encountered Rudolf Steiner’s Calendar of the Soul, I tried to understand it as separate verses, one for each week. Looked at this way it was most often incomprehensible to me. Although occasionally the verse seemed to fit something, either in the seasonal situation around me or in my inner condition, as often as not the verse seemed arbitrary when looked at alone. Three years ago I started to try to penetrate the calendar as a continuous sequence. Each day I read the verse and then held it inwardly for a few moments. At the end of the week I took a pencil and drew a gesture to represent the movement that that verse holds. As the year progressed I noticed that the movement of one verse leads to the movement of the next and all together they form an intricate breathing and weaving. When my first year with the calendar came to a close I decided to continue working with it meditatively for another year to try to experience this breathing/weaving more clearly. At the end of that year I began to create a drawing or painting exercise for each verse. Each exercise is an attempt at giving the participant an inner artistic experience of that week’s perspective in the weaving of the whole. Each week’s exercise has both a relationship to the world outside and to one’s inner world. I hope that by following these exercises in relationship to the calendar verses the participant will gradually become aware of this overall weaving/ breathing and it’s relationship to the exercises. At that point the participant will be able to develop their own exercises, of which I am sure there are unlimited possibilities.

winter into spring

On Saturdays in February and March we worked with the feeling of winter turning into spring. We explored going from light to dark, to too dark! And then finding the light again. We watched the colors on our paintings change as the colors outside changed around us.

Color Moods

For 3 weeks in March, Ella Manor Lapointe came to teach a block on color moods. We painted "wet on wet", mixing colors to see what mood they would produce. In the second week Ella brought a hat filled with little pieces of paper. On each was a word. We pulled out our "fortune" and tried to determine how to mix it's color mood. What colors make up bold? serene? angry? crisp? contemplative?

In the third week we worked our moods into a sense of place.

Imagination

For six weeks we worked with the processes of imagination. Working with stories and poems we let our inner pictures appear before us on the page.

color and space

For five weeks we explored color and space. Figures appeared, disappeared, and re-emerged transformed. We look at color differently now, we can see it in perspective.

Free Columbia 2009 Report

Free Columbia Report December 2009

The date was September 14^th, 2009. Thirty-five people sat in a circle in Bright Wing Studio in Hillsdale, New York. Names traveled around the circle, the history of painting in that studio was described, memories and hopes for the future were voiced, the feeling of “dropping in” from a nine-foot skateboard ramp was mentioned. And the Free Columbia Art Course began.

The Free Columbia Art Course is a full time, year long course based on the fundamentals of the art of painting as they appear and come to life through anthroposophy. This article is an update on how we are doing.

 

From September to November we explored color, its moods, its laws, its relationships and our relationship to it. We created two color wheels and began an introduction to the colors of the sketches that Rudolf Steiner gave as a training path for painters. On Saturdays we worked with a Michaelmas theme, exploring the mood of the season. In October Henrike Holdrege of the Nature Institute led us in four Saturday sessions of experiments from Goethe’s color theory. We observed after-images, atmospheric colors, and most amazing of all, colored shadows.

We also have a rich life of study. We are working through the book Theosophy as well as various lectures by Rudolf Steiner on art. Once a month a lively and varied group of people gather in a study called “Art. What?” Right now we are working with conversations of Joseph Beuys. In October we began The Study of Art and the Evolution of Human Consciousness with Patrick Stolfo. We began by modeling a small human figure with our eyes closed and progressed through observations of cave paintings and the art of ancient Egypt and Greece.

Our main weekday classes will turn in December to Color and Space, an introduction to oil painting and color perspective led by Nathaniel Williams.  After reviewing how space has been worked with in painting in the past we will create sketches of figures from observation using various shading techniques.  We will move from a sketch and spatial experience based on line and dark light relationships to creating a painting in which the spatial qualities inherent in color become central.  Fulltime students will be introduced to traditional preparation of canvases and working with oil paints through this project as well.

Last year we established a lending library of visual artwork. The participant makes a donation, ($100/1 year membership), to Free Columbia and chooses up to 3 pieces of art to take home for up to one year. At intervals we will have Library Events where artwork is both returned and checked out by other borrowers.

Currently we have four full time students and twenty-eight part time students. Out of a commitment to Social Threefolding and in an effort to experience a new way of working with money, Free Columbia works on the following economic model: Part time students pay a flat monthly rate of $80 which covers all classes and materials. Full time students are provided with a full scholarship and therefore do not pay tuition or material costs. In this way they are freed to devote themselves for the year to working in the free spiritual realm. Free Columbia is devoted to the development of creativity as a deed for the world. It is our hope that if what we are doing is valuable we will attract support from the realm of commodity production as well as from individuals. All donations are tax deductible and very greatly appreciated.

If you would like to find out more about us you can visit our website at www.freecolumbia.org or visit us in person at Bright Wing Studio. If you would like to apply as a full time student for the 2010-11 year you can contact us at freecolumbiaart@gmail.com

Laura Summer and Nathaniel Williams

Quotes from students:

“The atmosphere here is one of free thinking and free learning that I have never really experienced before. It is a mood of inquisitive exploration and observation.  To nurture each others beings and to bring something good into the world pervades life together in the studio.”

Laurel Iselin

“I feel that no matter what I choose to do next, this year of painting will be valuable to me. I’m grateful to be painting and to be working within a community of artists that are taking the time to learn, trust, and experience paint and color together.”

Karin Heide Weinrich

 

 

 

 

Art.What?

    

 In addition to our evening courses, once a month we have a study group called Art.What?

Currently we are studying a conversation between Joseph Beuys and Friedhelm Mennekes.

In these photos we are contemplating an exercise that explored creating a composition using sticks to express something human without losing"stickness".

Working in the Studio

Dark and Light Drawing

dark and light

horizontal and vertical

straight and curve

inside outside

how do we experience what we see?

Common Journal

We decided to start a common journal in a note book kept in the studio. The first page asks: 

What is it like?

artistic process?

social process?

economic process?

What record do we create?

here's an entry from week 3:

"Well into week 3. Is it really week 3? We are stronger and eaking into courageousness despite spelling and technical difficulties. Color is mighty. And we speak of looking into a color, letting it enter our being and experiencing what happens. And we learn patience, the year of painting is still in a fledgling stage. We learn patience as we pick color, in water, up onto our brushes and apply our brushes to pages with our own form of intention.

Well, we are in week 3. Painting continues. Words follow.

Free Columbia goes to ARTSWALK in Hudson NY

On October 17 we went to ARTSWALK. Here we looked at many varieties of creating. We continued our ever evolving discussion on "What is ART?"

green in process

The First Week

We started with a course on color. How are the colors related? How do they move? We worked to develop technique and experiences.

The Free Columbia Art Course has had a very active beginning. We have 4 full time and 28 part time students painting and having lively discussions five days per week. Here are some photos and comments from our first 6 weeks.