Painting
Painting The supernatural, through his higher perceptive faculties, is what the painter experiences and through the means of expressing painting in the sensual. An experience of the colour and the colour surface can make supersensory perception possible for the viewer. Painting is therefore the visualization of the supersensible with the means of color, which again allows the viewer the possibilities of higher perception. Painting is therefore not a forerunner of photography, which depicts spatial conditions in a naturalistic way with as much perspective as possible. For "this denies from the outset the first thing that belongs to the material of the painter, because the painter creates on the surface, and it is actually nonsense to want to feel spatially when the first thing in his material is the surface. ... we must also return to the colour perspective", (B161, 2.6.1923). The third dimension is the extrasensory perception of the effects of colour. "The third dimension always expresses itself through the nuanced red, yellow, blue, violet, as I put it on the surface here, there in the ethereal does not change the third dimension, but the colour changes, and it does not matter where I put the surface, I only have to change the colours accordingly. There you gain the possibility to live with the colour, to live with the colour in two dimensions. But in this way one rises from the spatial arts to the arts that are now two-dimensional, like painting, and overcomes the mere spatial", (B161,2.6.1923). In an artist like Raphael there is a deep sense of truth in what he saw, the immovable of the picture. "May I? May I capture a single moment with my brush? Isn't it a lie in the world to capture a single moment?", (B161, June 8, 1923). And this resulted in an artistic way of colour design for him, which uses the colour to express the supernatural and create effects. "You have to lift what a moment has out of time and space. You must not leave it in time and space, because in time and space it is untruth. You must give eternity to this moment. You have to give a presentiment through what you paint on the surface of something that cannot be on the surface", (B161, 8.6.1923). This incipient extrasensory experience for the viewer of corresponding artistic pictures was described by Rudolf Steiner as follows: "In this respect, human souls will make meaningful discoveries in the future. They will really connect their moral-spiritual being with that which the semblance of meaning brings us. ... So that we do not have this colour merely as something in front of us, which affects us, but so that we have this colour as something in which we are ourselves, that we become one with this colour. ... If one can experience in red the radiance and glow of divine anger with all the possibilities of evil that can lie in the human soul, and if one can experience in red how one learns to pray, then the experience with red is infinitely deepened. Then we can also feel how the red can shape the space", (B173, 1.1.1915). The colour design of a picture develops from the colour experience in the colour surface, it is not contour painting. It is rather that what the artist speaks to the colour, experiences how and in which forms and relations to the other colours it wants to live itself out. In which lighting conditions the colours want to be with each other. "And so settling into the inner world of colour means finding the creative in the colour itself, means learning to create from the colour, means getting behind the secret of painting", (B196, 23.8.1921).
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