The article focuses on the transformative potential of colours described by Rudolf Steiner. Steiner’s colour definitions are approached through the aesthetics of religion, investigating religion as a sensory and mediated practice. The goal is to clarify the identifiable features of the anthroposophical use of colour and how the Steinerian conception of colour relates to the anthroposophical worldview. Steiner’s conception of colours was strongly influenced not only by theosophy but also by J. W. von Goethe’s theory of colour and his ideas (...) of metamorphosis. Steiner’s colour definitions are discussed both through his published lectures and through his own drawings and paintings. These pictures were intended to function as models for artists working with anthroposophical art, and they can be understood as specific sensational (i.e. sensory) forms that many later artists have produced variations of. Steiner’s use of colour is approached particularly through his Nature Mood sketches (1922) and his painting New Life (Mother and Child) (1924). The analysis of artworks made in the anthroposophical tradition can deepen our understanding of Steiner’s conception of colours and its transformative potential. (shrink)

This article focuses on religiousness and spirituality in the art works of psychiatric patients of Nikkilä Hospital, Finland. The pictures analysed here belong to a collection held at the Helsinki City Museum and they were made during the twentieth century. The theoretical frame of the study is a cultural study of mental health. The collection is approached as presenting a specific kind of imagery which has connections not only to the personal history and diagnoses of the patients; their cultural context (...) and hospital environment is also taken into account. The religiousness and spirituality of the Nikkilä collection are also compared with outsider art and examples of art history internationally. (shrink)