Healing Through Art by Kenneth Smith
Healing Through Art
Kenneth Smith
After ten days of intensive work in April 2025, the Healing Through Art students finally gathered, mounted, and hung all their drawings and paintings and set up their sculptures. Three years of study were brought together for an exhibition, coinciding with their graduation. Two Bay Area Center for Waldorf Teacher Training (BACWTT) rooms were filled with their artistic efforts, struggles, discoveries, and successes. It was an impressive body of work; however, despite the richness and beauty of the exhibition, you might miss its deeper value if you were unaware that each piece on display was the result of a therapeutic exercise and the students’ own learning and therapeutic journey. Each piece held the potential to be used in support of someone in need of healing.
On display that day were veil paintings, watercolor paintings, darkness and light charcoal drawings, clay sculptures, and stone and wood carvings – the results of a multidisciplinary program that unfolds the values and possibilities offered by each discipline. Each artistic discipline has its own unique materials and processes, holding healing potential within its own practices.
Therapeutic Principles
These are some of the fundamental principles of the visual artistic therapies that were embodied in the display that day:
Awakening creativity. We should never underestimate the power and importance of the human capacity to be creative. When creativity is prevented, dismissed, or dries up, an inner part of us also dies. A fundamental aspect of human health is that from an early age, children find ways to explore the world, play, and allow their inner ideas, feelings, and impulses to flow out into the world as a part of their belonging, interacting, and knowing. In adults we call this “creativity.” It expresses a deep belief in ourselves and the world – that we have something to offer. Making art is an expression of this fundamental belief in the world and in life. Being able to create again after a period of creative silence can stir into life a part of us that has given up.
Awakening and enlivening our hands. What could we do without our hands? How would we be able to take hold of materials and tools and create things? How could we ever bring our ideas and imaginations into the world, into existence? All visual art is about making things. Through our hands, our inner world is able to become visible in the things we make – we manifest our inner life; we externalize it so it can be seen and shared. Our hands are the implement of will and making art requires our will. It has to become activated or nothing will ever happen. At its most basic level, art is healing when a person is able to move themselves, put themselves into their limbs, let their energy flow into a creative deed. The things which have then been made (in our case the visual arts – paintings, drawing, sculptures, and crafts) then stand there, outside of us, as testament to our will. We see our will forces reflected back to us, confirming and reaffirming our presence.
Reaching out and connecting to the world. Artists need the earth and all of its amazing substances. As one is motivated to create art, a new interest in the world is gradually awakened. Each art form provides an avenue into the mystery of substances and where they come from. What is this wood I’m carving? What tree did it come from? Where does this tree grow – what location, what country and landscape? What conditions does it like? What is it like – its smell, grain, color, texture? What have people thought about it over the ages? What traditions and stories and songs have been composed about it? What knowledge has accumulated around this one beautiful piece of wood? What is it like to sit beneath this tree? Each art form and the materials it uses has the potential to lead us out into the world and help us build enriching connections. We need the substances of the world for our art and we can grow to love them. It is not only pragmatic; art provides an encounter with the world and a pathway to a heartfelt sense of connectedness. This meeting between myself and the materials even informs the artistic process. For example, when I carve something in oak, I am influenced by its qualities and the results will be different than when I carve in maple.
Awakening and enlivening the senses. The visual arts obviously have the strongest connection to sight, but the whole human being is active in creating art. Both in the process of making and in the experience of observing, many more senses are engaged. The eyes are a window through which we can experience more than simply sight. In sculpture, the sense of touch is especially important. Aside from when we directly handle materials like clay, this sense also extends through the tools, like chisels, to the surface of the sculpture. The tool becomes an extension of the sense of touch. Even though a chisel may be hard and sharp, through it we have to feel the stone, feel the surface, and even feel into the interior of the stone to determine whether our blows will be damaging. During the sculpting process and while examining our work afterwards, our sense of touch is engaged and stimulated. Not only can we run our hands over the surface, but we can also stand back and run our eyes over the surface. Our eyes and sense of sight in sculpture must also develop a sense of touch, becoming activated and more sensitive. An interesting connection to this idea was Rudolf Steiner’s recommendation for children to strengthen their seeing by clay modeling and connecting their sight with their hands and fingers.[1] We may explore each visual art form more deeply by becoming aware of the way it reaches right into us and activates much more than just the eyes. Painting with a brush develops a fine sense of movement. Drawing can develop spatial awareness and proprioception. In fact, all of our twelve senses are engaged and stimulated by the visual arts.
Sensing ourselves. Learning to work in an artistically therapeutic way requires us to become more sensitive than with other types of artwork. In this type of training, students cannot simply live into their own enjoyment or creative struggles. They need to strive to become attuned to their inner experiences, paying attention to how the activity is working on them and raising consciousness to the subtle changes it is causing. During the process of an artistic exercise, we need to keep gently checking in with ourselves. Afterwards, we must reflect back on the experience in order to harvest and bring into awareness the overall impact. Working with classmates and sharing experiences help to elevate and objectify what we often regard as a purely personal experience. The outer training in color, form, light and dark, and techniques is matched with a corresponding inner training.
The Anthroposophical Framework for the Healing Arts. In Lecture Two of Art as Seen in the Light of Mystery Wisdom,[2] Steiner describes a fundamental relationship between the arts and the “bodies” of the human being. He draws clear connections between:
- Architecture and the physical body
- Sculpture and the etheric (or life) body
- Painting and the astral body
- Music and the ego (or self) body
- Poetry and eurythmy and their connection to higher bodies
Steiner describes how each art form is the result and expression of the forces that are active within us and how they should be allowed to flow outwards and express themselves in the world. This understanding gives us a deep orientation to how the arts can enliven, soothe, and engage the different inner aspects of the human being in a healing process. The Healing Through Art (HTA) program guides students into deep and concrete personal experiences of how these different art forms interact and support the whole human being. It shows how artwork may help to discern expressions of well-being or lack of health in the different inner bodies.
The Inner Worlds of Sculpture, Light and Darkness, and Color. To be able to offer artistic therapies, one needs to be immersed in the artistic worlds – to have swum in their seas and to have learned their languages. Each artform contains a world of experiences that can be understood, discerned, and articulated. Within each artform, archetypes can be found that provide anchor points around which exercises are developed. The archetype provides a central, universal, and balanced midpoint that we approach with our individual tendencies. When unwell, moving closer to the archetypal image or form with our own artwork leads us away from a position that is out of balance towards one that is more harmonious.
Reclaiming the Healing Powers of Art. For many people, art feels inaccessible – it is for creative geniuses and for the elevated world of galleries and museums. Embedded in Waldorf education, anthroposophy, and the anthroposophical artistic therapies is the image of the human as a creative and artistic being. The idea is that everyone is an artist and art is for everyone.
When working artistically with others, one of the first tasks is to open up these worlds in a warm, nonjudgemental way so that they may avoid self-criticism and be allowed to have their own direct, inner experience of the colors and forms. In his lectures, Rudolf Steiner points back in time to when art was embedded in society, together with science and religion, as one united, holistic human experience. In some ways, we try to enable this experience again. Art can bring us into connection with science through its aspect of knowledge, understanding, and technique. It can bring us into relationship with the spiritual through immersing in its archetypal worlds of color and form, and through the discovery that our individual inner worlds and processes are not isolated, but resonate with forces that are alive and active everywhere in nature and the universe around us. Recognizing and utilizing the healing aspects of art is a way of reclaiming its deep, original, and universal human value while also helping us become connected to art, which can be confusing and disassociating in our contemporary “art world.”
The HTA Program
Our HTA graduates had already been working as Waldorf teachers, extra lesson and special ed teachers, art teachers, artists, adult educators, and those in other healing professions who wanted to add artistic activities into their existing practices.
As the program founders and directors of the HTA program, Pamela Whitman and I are working to ensure that the wisdom of the anthroposophical arts continues into the future and that a new generation of students are able to harvest this incredibly profound and healing impulse. The importance of the arts in providing formative, guiding, and healing forces for humanity was recognized by Rudolf Steiner. He could sense the importance they would play in the evolutionary changes that are now unfolding around us and he made monumental efforts to bring new life and meaning to the arts. In our materialistic and mechanistic culture, the arts and the way they can support and uplift the human being are a direct antidote to the discombobulating forces that are impacting us through our technologies.
Kenneth Smith is the Director of the Bay Area Center for Waldorf Teacher Training (BACWTT). ken@bacwtt.org
[1] Rudolf Stiener, “Memory, Temperaments, Bodily Culture and Art,” Education (GA 307). Lecture given August 19, 1923. https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA307/English/RSPC1943/19230816p01.html
[2] Rudolf Steiner, “Impulses of Transformation for Man's Artistic Evolution I,” in Art as Seen in the Light of Mystery Wisdom (GA 275). Lecture given December 29, 1924. https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA275/English/RSP1984/19141229p01.html