Online Classes at Free Columbia
Free Columbia began in 2009 as a year long program based in experiential two dimensional art: painting and drawing. Over the years Free Columbia expanded to include puppetry, Goethean science, social change, children’s classes and much more, but the base in experience runs through all of our programs.
Now visual art at Free Columbia is taught in a variety of programs. Some years we have residential programs, some years short courses and low residency programs. We have new online classes and we teach week long and weekend workshops in many places around the country. Through all of these programs runs the investigation into the realm of quality. Example: how is red different from blue on a feeling level; what does heaviness feel like as opposed to levity?
One of our students once said, “I completed a four year BFA and they never used the word experience, you guys use it everyday”.
To enter into the realm of quality is a lesson in slowing down and listening to locate a perceptive capacity in yourself that goes beyond sympathy and antipathy. All of Free Columbia’s work in the visual arts encourages this perspective.
COLOR AS A WAY TO THE SPIRIT
Do you want to develop your capacity in the world of color perception, interaction and dynamic? Working with painting and drawing can be health giving and transformative. Working with color and composition in relation to meaning and expression can be life engendering for your soul. Whatever style of painting you are inclined toward, understanding color and composition will increase your capacity and enjoyment of your work.
When we begin to work with color we are often swayed by our likes and dislikes, but as painters we must move beyond this and learn the language of color. Although we see color with our eyes the experience of color is in the realm of quality and that realm is at first quite subtle. We must learn to quiet our sympathies and antipathies, cast off intellectual associations and listen to what the color is. Although you may at first wrinkle your brow in doubt at this, color is a non-material reality. To understand and to work with it as a partner we must learn to speak its language. Observe in yourself how one color feels, how is it different from another? Ask yourself the questions of the quality realm: Is it heavy or light? Is it warm or cold? Is it lively or still? Does it move toward me or away, and such.
This course will include written and video instruction as well as weekly group calls with participants from all over the world. Through this creative work a supportive transcultural community will be formed. Often in a group, working together, we can feel inspiration and understanding flow between us.
The course will be taught in blocks of 4 - 6 weeks. You can join at the beginning of any block. Blocks 2024/25 include:
Color and Contemplation September/October
Color Mood November/December
Color Dynamic January/ February
Color Devotion March/April
Layered Water Color and Surface Collage April/May
Tuition: Free Columbia is committed to making the cultural realm financially accessible to everyone. Each block is on a sliding scale of $0-200. A sliding scale tool is available.
Acknowledgements:
Many people have been my teachers over the years. Many of these exercises were developed out of the exercises of Jennifer Thomson, Ella Manor Lapointe, and Nathaniel Williams as well as, of course, Rudolf Steiner and Goethe.
Drawing to Experience the Gospel of John
How can we learn to know something on a deeper level?
An online Webinar November through April
Time TBA
How can we experience this sacred text? There are many ways - but in this online webinar we will experience through the creative process of contemplation, drawing and painting. No experience is necessary, the exercises are simple and process oriented. Each week Laura Summer will demonstrate an exercise and answer questions and then, during the week, you can try it at home. The next week we will break into small groups and you can share you work and experience.
“Saint John relates what he experiences as an initiated seer, who could look into the Spiritual worlds…. Whoever looks upon it as a book that one should read and understand in the same way as one reads and understands any other book knows nothing of the Saint John Gospel. He alone has knowledge of it who can experience it”. Rudolf Steiner Esoteric Christianity
Sliding Scale $0 - $220
2024 Class Schedule:
All course tuition is on a sliding scale, students are expected to make a monthly contribution that is significant for them. Sliding Scale explanation and suggestions are available from Laura Summer.
All times are New York time
1pm
Drawing to Experience the Gospel of Saint John
An online Webinar for 22 weeks
January 3 – May 29
Fridays once a month: Cold Wax
Tuesdays once a month: working artistically with the Mantra of the School for Spiritual Science
As well as these some previously given courses are available this year without zoom calls. If you want to take one of these courses you will be sent it in pdf form, some with video demonstrations. This can also work if the times offered for zoom calls don’t work for you.
All of these courses work with the subject by drawing and painting.
Sliding scale $0-300
Rudolf Steiner’s sketches for painters ( Nature Moods)
Rudolf Steiner’s Genesis lectures
The Philosophy of Freedom by Rudolf Steiner
The Gospel of John
The Calendar of the Soul
Plants and Landscapes
Rudolf Steiner’s Lectures on Color
Image Colors
The Apocalypse of John
Visual Art: Exercises in Painting and Color
an Educaredo course by Laura Summer
This course is an overview of the work Laura has done with color. The student receives a lesson each month, work is done at home and Laura provides email support and mentoring. Sign up is through Educaredo.
Reflections from students in previous courses:
“This course has helped me to break out of many narrow habits. I see how my own artwork is subtly transformed. And how in looking out into the world, I see relationships of form and color that I’ve never noticed before. They show themselves to me and I can imagine them saying, “Where have you been?” I had the image around the time of our third session that I was riding on a train and that the course wasn’t putting me on a different track but that the track I was already on was climbing higher and through new territory.” Jo Valens
“If you want to know how color works, how it lives, how it walks, how it sits on a page - take this course. Color had always been a blind spot for me. I'd always been a black-white-gray, light-and-shadow artist. I hadn't learned about color theory beyond memorizing the color wheel, and the only way I knew about complimentary colors was by remembering to look across the wheel from one color to the other. Now I know how the color wheel works, why compliments exist, how they're useful, and how the individual colors themselves act. This course will require a lot of exertion at times, and will ask you to do things you've never done before, but it'll be worth it.” Andrew Madey