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The Healing Power of Art
Healing Through Art Program
The Healing Power of Art
Online Distance Program
Begins October 5, 2024
Discover the healing potential of art through painting, light and darkness drawing, sculpture, and form drawing. Develop your artistic abilities, build observation skills, and increase your sensitivity as a foundation for therapeutic artistic practice. The Healing Power of Art program is also a preparation for our 3-year Healing Through Art program.
October 2024-June 2025 | Cost: $1,080 ($120 per month)
Instruction via monthly online classes with follow-up assignments
In our time, there is a widespread need for the inner benefits that artistic work can provide. Artistic work is able to stimulate remarkable forces of healing. It is calming, centering, engaging, and enlivening and can direct our own life forces of health into positive pathways for our body, soul, and spirit.
The Healing Power of Art program will build a foundation in the health promoting aspects of art and provide the groundwork for further studies. This program is for people of all ages and levels of experience who want to discover the therapeutic aspects of art, with the online format allowing participation from around the world. Students will receive the most benefit by having their own workspace and by developing a routine of regular art practice.
Program Format
- The program runs for 9 months from October 2024 to June 2025.
- Near the beginning of each month, there will be online classes that allow live participation. Recordings of these classes will be available to those unable to attend live.
- Students will receive videos of homework assignments each month that further develop the content.
- Students should expect a minimum of 2 hours of live online classes per month and a minimum of 2 hours of homework per month.
- Students upload completed work to our online platform for viewing by teachers and classmates and to receive feedback.
- At the end of each month, students attend one of the scheduled feedback meetings that run at multiple times of the day to accommodate different time zones.
Schedule of Zoom meeting days:
From 10am-12:30pm PT on Oct. 5, Nov. 2, Dec. 7, 2024 PT; Jan. 11, Feb. 1, Mar. 1, Apr. 5, May 3 & 31.
Schedule of Zoom feedback check-in days:
From 9:30-11:00am, 4-5:30pm, 6:30-8pm PT on Oct. 30, Nov. 26, 2024; Jan. 7 & 28, Feb. 25, Mar. 25, Apr. 29, May 27 & Jun. 28, 2025.
Materials List
Program Leaders
Pamela Whitman, M.A. received her B.S. from MIT, where she studied both science and humanities. She participated in the Light, Color and Darkness Painting Therapy training in Holland and received her certification from the Medical Section at the Goetheanum, while also completing her Master’s degree in Human Development. Her career and interests span the fields of science, art, spirituality, consciousness, psychology, healing, and education, all of which she incorporates as a therapist, international adult educator, and painter.
Ken Smith is the Director of BACWTT. He studied at Emerson College, England, and completed his training in sculpture and the visual arts with practices in pedagogical and therapeutic work. After working in Waldorf education, he taught as Course Leader of the 3-year Visual Arts and Sculpture Training program at Emerson College. He has been active internationally in Anthroposophical art and Waldorf education for over 25 years.
For more information, please contact: tiffany@bacwtt.org | (415) 479-4400 | www.bacwtt.org
Click this link to register now
Healing Through Art Program
2nd Cohort Beginning Summer 2025
Develop insights, artistic skills and practices
to bring art into the service of healing processes.
A 3-year postgraduate therapeutic visual arts program working out
of the Anthroposophical understanding of the human being.
Program Leaders: Pamela Whitman and Kenneth Smith
Multidisciplinary Visual Arts Program: Painting, Sculpture, Drawing, Crafts
The Healing Through Art program will guide students to build knowledge, skills, and sensitivity in a range of artistic mediums and practices. The core focus of the program is on color, light and darkness work, sculpture and form drawing.
The intention is to develop knowledge of the healing potentials of a range of different activities and mediums, so that they may be included in one’s therapeutic practice.
Artistic work brings us into closer connection with ourselves and with nature. It opens and reveals the inner world through the colors, forms, tones, and lines that we create. It shows us to ourselves and allows us to see, to adjust, to balance, and harmonize.
Art becomes healing when the archetypal lawfulness of the medium and the integrity of the creative process are able to enter and work upon the human constitution and engage the self in activating life-giving forces.
Each artistic and craft activity addresses and works upon a particular aspect of the human being. Through the very nature of the activity, we are brought into alignment with and allow ourselves to be guided by the forces that stream through all of the world, including ourselves.
Part-Time Modular Course
The 2nd Cohort of the Healing Through Art program will begin in July 2025. We will meet in person two times per year (summer and spring) with monthly online classes in between with monthly artistic homework assignments. The program will provide a minimum of 280 classroom hours plus an accompanying minimum of 280 hours of mentored, project-based work from home.*
*Requirements of iARTe accrediting body of the Goetheanum
Course Outline
A Three-Year Journey
Our work encompasses an introduction to foundational artistic practices, Anthroposophic medicine and therapies, the Anthroposophic understanding of the human being, including 3-fold, 4-fold, 7-fold and biographical aspects, developmental and metamorphic processes, the therapist-client relationship, case studies and artistic healing practice in a professional setting.
Through the Light, Color and Darkness work, we embark on a journey through the 12 fundamental Light & Darkness exercises using charcoal—a path of incarnation for the spirit into the vessel of our body on earth. We learn to bridge the polarity of Light & Darkness both in the outer world and in the human being through the world of Color. Through experiencing the inherent qualities of the colors out of their origin in the interaction between Light and Darkness, working with pastel, moist painting and veil painting, we come to the discovery of “Color Space” in the world and within us, as we follow this path of initiation through color.
The sculpture work begins with developing the capacities and abilities to sense the ‘life’ in sculptural forms. We then move through a deep process of creating sculptural forms that express the four bodies—physical, etheric, astral and ego, and develop our own health and vitality in these four areas. A study of the seven planetary sculptures from the First Goetheanum building is an essential component leading us into the world of evolutionary and metamorphic processes.
Form drawing builds over the three years so that students develop a sense for its balancing, harmonizing effects and how it can be used therapeutically.
The Healing Through Art program will guide students through a deepening process over three years from the hygienic and enlivening aspect of artistic activities into the deeper understanding of human nature, individual life journeys, and the ability to guide artistic therapies. Each year supports the developing capacities that provide a foundation for the following year.
“The basis of all that I have to say consists of two things: the cosmic threefoldness of light, color, and darkness and the human being as the microcosmic threefoldness of spirit, soul and body; of thinking, feeling and will.”
Liane Collot d’Herbois, Light, Darkness and Colour in Painting Therapy.
Competencies*
The program will ensure that students acquire the following competencies:
· Ability to create artistic works in a range of disciplines, cultivate a personal artistic practice, and develop observational skills.
· Learn essential Anthroposophical concepts and integrate these into artistic practice.
· Use the artistic process therapeutically.
· Learn the medical foundations and Anthroposophical understanding of the human being.
· Develop knowledge and understanding of human development, biography, education, and psychology.
· Develop professional therapeutic measures, procedures, behavior, reflection, and supervision. Understand the legal context of professional practice, status, ethics, and legalities.
· Engage in personal development, lifelong learning, and further training.
· Understand the legal context of professional practice, professional status, ethics, and legalities.
· Be capable of own innovation and research.
*Requirements of iARTe accrediting body of the Goetheanum.
“The two streams, both the artistic as well as the medical one are based on Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual study of man. If a doctor wishes to find a true medicine for a particular patient he must look for the principles of origination of the substance in connection with the development of man’s being.
If color is to become medicine, the coming into being of color must be traced to its origins in the forces of darkness and light, again in connection with man’s being.”
Light, Darkness and Color in Painting Therapy by Liane Collot d’Herbois
From the foreword by Elisa Métrailler
Program Leaders
Pamela Whitman, M.A. received her B.S. from MIT, where she studied both science and humanities. She participated in the Light, Color and Darkness Painting Therapy training in Holland and received her certification from the Medical Section at the Goetheanum, while also completing her Master’s degree in Human Development. Her career and interests span the fields of science, art, spirituality, consciousness, psychology, healing, and education, all of which she incorporates as a therapist, international adult educator, and painter.
Ken Smith is the Director of BACWTT. He studied at Emerson College, England, and completed his training in sculpture and the visual arts with practices in pedagogical and therapeutic work. After working in Waldorf education, he taught as Course Leader of the 3-year Visual Arts and Sculpture Training program at Emerson College. He has been active internationally in Anthroposophical art and Waldorf education for over 25 years.
Adjunct Faculty
Dr. Daciana Iancu, MD has worked in hospitals, ICUs, hospice, nursing homes and primary care. She has also studied acupuncture, Functional Medicine, Chi Nei Tsang, Reiki, and Energy and Intuitive Healing modalities. In 2014 Dr. Iancu discovered Anthroposophic Medicine, and in 2018 she started her own private practice where she can integrate all these modalities and practice in a slow, intimate setting to provide personalized care.
Dr. Carmen Hering, DO integrates Anthroposophic Medicine with Osteopathic and Family Medicine in her private practice in Albany, CA. She has served as adjunct faculty at Touro University College of Osteopathic Medicine, serves as faculty for the International Physician Medical Training (IPMT) for Anthroposophic Medicine and teaches at the Bay Area Center for Waldorf Teacher Training.
Tonya Stoddard, LCSW is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with a private practice in Sebastopol, CA. She provides individual prevention and treatment for adolescents and adults struggling with mental health concerns, relationship issues, chronic medical difficulties, addiction, trauma, and behavioral problems. Tonya is an Associate with the Association for Anthroposophic Psychology and is the AAP representative on the Board of Directors of the Anthroposophic Health Association in North America.
Dates: 2025-2026
Summer session: Two weeks in person: July 14-26, 2025
Online Saturday classes, 9am—3:30pm PT:
Aug. 23, Sept. 20, Oct. 18, Nov. 22, Dec. 20, 2025; Jan. 17, Feb. 14, Mar. 14, 2026
Spring session: One week in person: March 27-Apri 3, 2026
Cost: $5520 per year
For more information, please contact: tiffany@bacwtt.org | (415) 479-4400 | www.bacwtt.org
If you are ready to register, please fill out our secure online application below. Or, if you prefer, use the link to download a PDF of the application. Once it is complete, please mail to:
Tiffany Lee, Enrollment Coordinator
The Bay Area Center for Waldorf Teacher Training
P.O. Box 21265
El Sobrante, CA 94820
