Painting out of the colour is Steiner's method of laying colour first and letting figure and form arise from the colours' mutual relationships.
Painting Out of the Colour in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's method of painting in which the coloured patch is laid down first and the figure is allowed to arise out of the mutual relationships between the colours, rather than a form being drawn and then filled in. Steiner described the method in the lecture of 30 December 1921 at Dornach, published as The Ideas Behind the Building of the Goetheanum (GA 289), and pointed to the small dome of the first Goetheanum as the trial ground. He treated colours as experiences rather than as properties of objects: red confronts the self like an attack and makes the soul recoil, blue invites the soul to follow, and the harmony of the two holds a balance between retreat and advance. A drawn contour line, he argued, is an artistic untruth, because in nature the horizon appears only where blue sky meets green sea. The method is still taught in painting training at the Goetheanum in Dornach.
Painting out of the colour reverses the usual order of picture making. Instead of drawing an outline and colouring it in, the painter sets down patches of colour and waits for the relationships between them to suggest a figure. Steiner introduced the practice for the small dome of the first Goetheanum, where a blue field gathered itself into a Faust-like figure and an orange one into a floating child.
In Steiner's Own Words
Red is not just red, red is that which, when one confronts it, means an experience like an attack on our self from the outside world. Red is that which causes one’s soul to flee from that which thus reveals itself as red. Blue is that which invites us to follow it, and a harmony of red and blue can then result in a balance between moving backward and moving forward. In short, if the coloured is experienced, it produces a whole world. And out of the coloured, one can create the form by merely letting the colour in its mutual relationships have an effect on one.
What it Means Today
The nearest modern parallel is not a colour theory but a teaching method. Josef Albers, who led the colour course at Yale University from 1950 and published Interaction of Color with Yale University Press in 1963, built the whole course on a claim that sits very close to Steiner's: colour is the most relative medium in art, and a colour is never seen as it physically is, only as it behaves beside its neighbours. Albers had his students work with cut and pasted papers instead of pigment, so that no drawn contour could smuggle in a decision the colour had not made. One colour was made to look like two, two colours made to look alike, until the student stopped asking what a colour was and began noticing what it did.
Steiner reached the same threshold from the other side. Albers wanted the student to see the relation; Steiner wanted the relation to generate the picture, so that a blue patch on the small dome ceiling became a Faust-like figure without anyone having drawn Faust. Thalira synthesis: Albers proves the perceptual half of Steiner's claim, that colour is relational before it is descriptive, and leaves standing the half Steiner insisted on, that the relation is itself an experience the painter can follow until it yields a form.
The working instruction is plain and difficult: put the colour down before you know what it is for, and let the figure declare itself out of the meeting of two fields rather than out of your intention.
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