Colour

PART ONE:

THE NATURE OF COLOUR

The basis for a spiritual-scientific

understanding of colour

for artists

LECTURE ONE

Dornach, 6 May 1921

Colour Experience—Image Colours

Colour, which is our subject for the next three days, concerns the physicist—although we shall not discuss this aspect just now.¹ It also concerns, or should concern, the psychologist, the metaphysician, but it must above all concern the artist, the painter. If we look around at contemporary ideas about colour, however, we find that although the psychologist may have this or that to say about our subjective experience of colour, this contributes little to our understanding of its objective nature—a matter which is left entirely to the physicist. Moreover, there is little inclination to admit that art has anything decisive to say about the nature of colour—not at least for an objective understanding of coloration.

Nowadays people are very far from grasping the meaning of Goethe’s often quoted aphorism: ‘He, to whom nature begins to unveil her open secrets, feels an irresistible longing for her worthiest interpreter, art.’

A person who, like Goethe, has a living experience of art has no doubt that what the artist says about colour is deeply connected with its real nature. Normally colour is regarded as belonging in the first place to the coloured surfaces we perceive, to the impressions we receive from the colours of nature. We can produce a certain range of colour with the familiar prismatic experiments and we can seek insight into the realm of colour in many other ways, too. But colour is still primarily regarded as a subjective impression.

You know that physics has long had the habit—we might say bad habit—of maintaining that the coloured world we see around us is present only for our senses and that, if we are to speak objectively, colour is no more than certain vibrations of the finest form of matter, known as the ether.

Those who think in terms of such definitions and explanations have no idea how their experience of colour is actually connected with a vibrating ether. But when people speak of the qualities of colour itself they refer only to the subjective impression. Then they look around for something else that is objective and in doing so they wander far away from colour. For in conjuring up all these ether vibrations nothing is left of the real stuff of our world of colour. In order to grasp colour objectively we must try to keep within the world of colour itself and not leave it; then we may hope to penetrate its real nature.

Let us try to sink ourselves completely into what we receive through colour from the rich and varied world around us. We must feel what is in colour if we wish to penetrate into its true nature, bringing insight into our feelings. We must question our feelings about what is living in the colour which surrounds us. To start with we must experiment, taking examples that are not too difficult to analyse but have some striking characteristic that can help us to reach the essentials.

Let us begin with the colour green, spreading it as a plain surface in a quite diagrammatic manner. If we now simply let our feelings respond to this colour, we can experience something in the green that needs no further definition. No one can doubt that we have the same experience from this colour as when we look at the plant-coloured earth about us; we cannot help it, of course, because it is green. We must disregard everything else the plants mean to us and look only at their greenness.

We could very easily insert the most varied colours into our patches of green. We will, however, limit ourselves to three particular colours; into the first patch I place some red, in the second a kind of peach-blossom colour, and in the third patch blue. Now from your immediate impression of these three examples you will agree that something quite different happens in each case. If I look at this red shape within the green, or the peach-blossom, or the blue, I have a quite definite feeling from each. The next step is to express what lies in these different feelings as our soul experiences them.

Abstract definitions can achieve very little; we must try to bring out the true character of our actual experience. Therefore let us try to enter imaginatively into the colours we have here. From the first example we may have the impression of a green countryside in which I have drawn red figures. It does not matter whether I give them red faces and skins, or red clothes; in the second, figures in peach-blossom colour (which is similar to the colour of the human skin); and in the third patch of green I have painted blue figures. We are not creating pictures but simply making a definite series of impressions. Imagine you have the following scene before you: figures in red, or figures coloured like peach-blossom, or figures in blue walking over a green meadow—in all three, quite different impressions! Looking at the first you might say: the red figures in their green surroundings enliven the whole green meadow. The meadow becomes all the greener because of the presence of the red figures while the green becomes richer, more living. I should find it disturbing if these red figures were not painted as moving figures. It would feel wrong in any other way: I should want to say—it just cannot be like that. I have to make these red figures like lightning; they must be moving. Still red figures in a green meadow! They are disturbing in their stillness. They are moving because of their very redness. They bring something with them into the meadow that cannot be kept still. We must experience a quite definite range of feelings if we are to gain any insight.

The second picture is entirely harmonious. The peach-blossom figures can stay there quite peacefully; they can stay there for ever. My feeling tells me that these peach-blossom figures have no especial relationship with the meadow and do not affect it by making it seem greener; they are quite neutral. They can stand where they like without troubling me; they have no inner connection with the green meadow.

Now let us look at the third example, blue figures in the green meadow. The green, surely, does not remain unchanged; the blue begins to dissipate the green meadow in which the figures stand. The meadow’s greenness is paralysed; it is no longer green. Let us try to grasp imaginatively what is going on: blue figures (they could just as well be blue spirits) are wandering about in a green meadow—this then ceases to be green and takes on a bluish hue. The meadow itself becomes bluish and ceases to be green. And if these blue figures were to remain long in the green meadow it would all slip away from me. Then I would find myself thinking that the blue figures are trying to carry off the meadow and dispose of it in some deep abyss. A green meadow just cannot stay as it is if there are blue figures in it; they take it up and make off with it.

This is how one can experience colour.

And we must be able to have colour experience, or we cannot grasp what the world of colour is at all. The imagination is a fine and beautiful instrument but we must experiment with it if we want to discover this for ourselves. We must ask what happens to a green meadow in which red figures move. Does it not become more vividly green, its greenness more intense, so that the green begins to burn? The red figures cause such activity in the green which surrounds them that they themselves can no longer stay still; they must run about. And if I want to paint in the right way I cannot paint people who stand still as red; I would have to paint them as if they were dancing in a ring. A ring of red figures dancing in a green meadow would appear quite natural.

On the other hand, figures the colour of the human skin could stand in the green meadow just like that for all eternity. They are quite neutral towards the green meadow; they remain just as they are without changing in the least—quite different from the blue figures who make off with the meadow, taking its greenness from it.

In order to discuss our actual experience of colour we need comparisons. A crudely philistine approach will not let us experience colour at all. We must make comparisons but not the usual philistine kind of comparisons to say, for instance, that one billiard ball pushes another. Stags push, also bullocks and buffaloes, but not billiard balls, in actual fact. We have to speak of ‘thrust’ in physics because we need the support of analogy in order to speak at all.

This makes it impossible to look into the world of colour as it is. It is within that world we must seek the real nature of colour.

Let us take a characteristic colour which we have already looked at—the colour green which we enjoy so much in summer time. We are quite used to seeing this as the colour that belongs particularly to plants. There is no other sphere in which we experience a colour so intimately bound up with the inner nature of an object as green is with the plant. If an animal happens to be green we do not feel it must be this colour and no other, but we have an underlying feeling that it could be some different hue. But with the plants we have the impression that green belongs to the plant as something peculiarly its own. We can now try through the green of the plant to penetrate the objective nature of colour instead of remaining as hitherto within its subjective aspects.

What is the plant which can reveal the colour green to us in such a special way?

From spiritual science you know that the plant owes its existence to the fact that, besides its physical body, it has an etheric body. It is the etheric body which is the source of life in the plant. But the etheric body is not green. What makes the plant green is to be found in its physical body; although green belongs to the plant in a most intimate way it is not the essential nature of the plant—that lies in the etheric body. If the plant had no etheric body it would be a mineral and it is the mineral nature of the plant that appears as green. The etheric body is quite a different colour although it does reveal itself in the plant through the green of the mineral element. If we study the green of the plant in relation to the etheric body, we have on one side the true nature of the plant which lives in the etheric world and on the other the green which has been drawn off and separated from the plant. But in taking green from the plant it is just as if we had made a copy of something. What has been abstracted from the etheric in green is really only a picture, or image, of the plant; this image, so characteristic of the plant, can only be green. In green we have the image of the plant. If green is regarded as the essential plant colour then it must also be regarded as a picture, or image, of the plant; in green we see the especial character of the plant as image.

This is absolutely essential. In the portrait gallery of an old castle it is obvious that only portraits of the ancestors hang there and not the ancestors themselves. Usually the ancestors themselves aren’t there, only their portraits! In the same way, the essential plant is no more in the green than the ancestors are actually present in their portraits. When we look at green we have no more than the image of the plant. Now think once more how green is peculiar to the plant and remember how the plant is above all the most characteristic form of life. The animal possesses a soul; man has soul and spirit. The mineral is without life. Life is the particular characteristic of the plant. The animal has, in addition, a soul. The mineral kingdom is also without soul. Man has, besides these qualities, a spirit. We cannot say of man, animal or mineral that life is the essential quality; in each case it is something else. With the plant, life is its essential characteristic—the colour green is the image of this life. We can therefore say quite objectively:

Green represents the lifeless image of the living.

Proceeding inductively—as the learned should do—we have now arrived at the point where an objective description of the colour green is possible. Just as the photograph can be described as a picture of someone or something, so green can be described as the lifeless image of that which is living. I have passed from mere reflection on the subjective impression to the realization that green is the lifeless image of the living.

Now let us take another colour, peach-blossom. To be more precise, I should rather speak of the colour of the human skin, which naturally differs from one person to another. But this is really what I mean when I speak of peach-blossom: the human colour or the colour of the human skin. Let us now try to understand its essential nature. Usually we look at it only from outside; we look at a man and see the colour of his skin only from outside. Can we become aware of it, know it from within, as we have tried to do with the green of the plant? We can, if we do it in the following way.

If a man really tries to become aware that he is a being of soul and thinks of this inner life of soul as being present within his physical form, then he will also realize that the soul must be visible to some extent in the physical form. His nature is revealed by the way the soul flows into his physical form in the colour of his skin. What this means can best be realized by looking at a man whose soul is no longer fully present in his skin, whose outer form is no longer ensouled. What happens to such a man? He turns green. Life is still there, but he turns green. We speak sometimes of ‘green’ people and we know the peculiar green of the complexion when the soul is no longer fully present. The effect shows clearly in the human complexion. On the other hand, the more a man’s complexion takes on a particular ruddy hue the more we are aware of how he lives in it. If we observe the temperament of a ‘green’ person and one with a really fresh complexion it becomes evident how the soul lives in the actual colour of the skin. Each man’s experience of himself shines forth in the very colour of his skin. So we can say that the colour which appears in the human complexion is in fact an image of the soul. Of all the varied colours in the world around us peach-blossom is the colour we would select as being the nearest to that of the human skin.² In painting we can only imitate the colour of the human skin by various artistic devices.

Now, while the colour of the human being is indeed the image of the soul, it is quite clearly not the soul itself. It is the living image of the soul. The soul, experiencing itself, is revealed in the colour of the human skin. And this colour is not lifeless like the green of the plant. Only when his soul withdraws does a person turn green; then he can become a corpse. But in this colour we have something that is alive:

Peach-blossom represents the living image of the soul.

We have now considered two colours; in both cases they have been ‘images’. We have endeavoured to understand the objective nature of colour, not merely to take the subjective impression and invent a theory of wave motion to explain it which is then imagined to be objective. It would be quite absurd to divorce human life from the colour of the human skin. It is a quite different physical experience to have pink cheeks or a greenish pallor. A definite inner existence is revealed through the colour.

Let us now take a third colour, blue. It is impossible to find anything of which we can say that blue is characteristic in the way that green is characteristic of the plant; nor could we speak of blue as we could of peach-blossom and the human complexion. Among animals there is no single colour that is characteristic of their nature as the colour of his complexion is of man, or green is of the plant. With blue we cannot start, as we have done so far, from natural phenomena.

If we want to continue our exploration of the nature of colour we should leave blue aside for the moment, and turn to the lighter colours. If we take the colour known as white we shall find that we shall progress more quickly and easily. White cannot be said, in the first place, to be the characteristic colour of any being in the outer world. We could, of course, turn to the mineral kingdom, but it would be better to look in quite another direction to form an objective idea of the colour white. Let us imagine we have some white in front of us and light is allowed to play upon it, illuminating it; at once we feel a certain kinship between the white and the light. At first this is merely an impression, but it becomes more than impression the moment we turn to the sun itself. For the sun has a certain whiteness in its light and is the source from which all natural illumination on earth is derived. But neither what we see as the sun, nor as white—with its inner kinship to light—appear in the same way as external colours do. External colours appear on objects. The whiteness of the sun, which represents light to us, does not appear directly on objects. Later on we will consider the kind of colour we may call the white of paper or chalk, but that will mean making rather a detour.

First of all, in order to understand white we should let ourselves be led by white to the light as such. In order to strengthen this feeling, we need only remember that the opposite of white is black. We have no doubt that black is darkness; we can very easily identify white with brightness, with the light as such. In short, we find an inner connection between light and white when we allow our feelings to speak to us. We will investigate this further in the next few days.

If we reflect on the nature of light—and are not tempted to cling to the Newtonian fallacy³ but observe things without prejudice—we shall say: there is a special connection between white, appearing as colour, and light. We will at first leave true white on one