Art with Spirit
by Claudia Pfiffner
What is the difference between doing art at a priest Seminary and doing art at the local art school?
This was my question as we began our first Art class with teacher Regine Kurek.
Regine Kurek, our art teacher, had prepared a table for each student with six painting colours, two shades of each primary colour. We received two 8x11 watercolour papers.
The first task was to paint a landscape to represent the beginning of our time at the Seminary.
Painting by Claudia Pfiffner
The second task was to expand the original image on one of the four sides using the second piece of paper.
Claudia’s two paintings side by side
After we finished painting, we reflected on our work.
Paintings by Silke Chatfield
Paintings by Marc Delannoy
Paintings by Daniil Kalinov
I noticed with my own paintings that there was a gap between what I had wanted to paint and the result.
I intended to paint an island with a treasure on it. However, what appeared on my paper was the island in the foreground with the treasure further away in the sky.
How did this happen? Perhaps I had not been clear enough in my intention before starting to paint? Did the paint brush have a mind of its own or as Rudolf Steiner describes in Mystery Centres, Lecture II, did the colours take their “right place on the canvas”?
Perhaps one answer to my above question is that at the Seminary, we let the medium and the colours speak rather than just the painter. The painter then becomes like a medium through which the message can flow to be read by the one who has eyes to see.
Our Author:
Claudia Pfiffner
has been a teacher for most of her life, a Waldorf early childhood
educator for the last fifteen years.
Claudia has begun studies in the “Knowing Christ” program
in
the Seminary in Toronto.
This is a blog entry by a student at The Seminary of the Christian Community in North America. These are posted weekly by the student editorial team of Marc Delannoy and Silke Chatfield. For more information about our seminary, see the website: www.christiancommunityseminary.ca and for even more weekly podcast and video content check out the Seminary’s Patreon page: www.patreon.com/ccseminary/posts.
The views expressed in this blog entry do not necessarily represent the views of the Seminary, its directors or the Christian Community. They are the sole responsibility of its author.