Truth and Color

by Deborah Lothrop

The book, 'Light, Darkness and Colour in Painting-Therapy', by Liane Collot d’Herbois begins with a remarkable statement of purpose which can be easily overlooked in the initial rush for intellectual gratification. She says:

When I was young and studied painting I heard many different things about how one was supposed to paint… I thought that there ought to be something that people could have in common. The fact that colors exist is an objective truth but people paint them in many different, subjective ways.

It is important to know that the so-called “therapy” book was not actually written by Collot. Instead, it is transcriptions of her courses for doctors and therapists and has been edited. Some of her remarks are in response to specific questions. Some are more general. However, that first sentence resounds throughout the therapy book as well as her other book, Colour, and expresses her perspective on both color and the human organism.

Liane Collot d’Herbois

How do we paint, do anything artistic, following rules? If we carefully examine the physical world around us, we find ourselves surrounded by rules. Goethe dedicated many years of his life to describing the rules. When we practice observation, we are quite simply looking for the rules. The human being in ill-health has fallen away from the rules. Currently, our planet is falling away from the rules, the natural order, the breathing ecological balance.

How do we know what are the rules? We study what is outside of us, watching from the inside. We look out through the windows. The separation lends objectivity, as much as possible. We study what is inside us, watching from the outside, from a place we can inhabit once we begin to know it, peering in through the windows.

The I longs to be on the earth; only then can an individual take up his karma. The soul may not long for the earth, but the I develops a yearning, an idea, an ideal; and then, like a fruit that is ripe, it begins its journey earthward, gathering astral substance as it descends. In concert with living forces, matter is laid down, veil upon living veil, gradually increasing in complexity, myriad variations on the enormous central theme of the human being. With what love the I plunges into matter. With what love do the spiritual beings witness. Do they think, in some angelic way, “Maybe this will be one who will be able to fully share all it is to descend into matter?”

There is a turning point. Embryonic development involves the meeting of pure, undifferentiated living material with an idea, a human being, all-at-the-same-time. The non-material gathers further, less-rarified non-material as it moves towards incarnation. At physical conception, what is material gradually becomes a chalice, bearing the possibility of repeated birth of higher members, like an opening flower, spirit borne by matter. The approach to painting developed by Liane Collot d’Herbois is a means by which one can observe this meeting of the material and the spiritual in the human individual, in oneself, in the other. One may find another way to experience the meeting of the earth and the cosmos, of day and night, of inbreath and outbreath, of systole and diastole, in life-filled movement.

Deborah Lothrop (lcdinmaine@hotmail.com) is a graduate of the Formation Thérapeutique Lumière-Ténèbres-Couleur, Paris, France, and is fully certified by the Medical Section of the School for Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum as a practitioner of Light Darkness Color Therapeutic Painting.