Soul-Lifting Color
Charles Andrade
Child Prodigy Center at the WIN Institute, Basalt, Colorado
For Basalt-based artist Charles Andrade, color and light are spiritual companions.
It is a belief he began to form in the late 1970s and early ’80s, while studying art therapy in London. There, Andrade was exposed to a philosophy—that color is a living interaction between darkness and light, the same dynamic duality that informs the human soul—shared by artist and color theorist Liane Collot d'Herbois, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Rudolph Steiner (of Waldorf School fame).
Steiner encouraged artists to paint walls with transparent radiant color. He called it “lasur.” The technique creates an experience of color as if it were in the space and not just on the wall.
For the past two decades, Andrade has been using the Lazure technique for Waldorf Schools countrywide, in hospitals and private homes, imbuing them with a more beautiful and spiritual environment.
Unlike the ragging and sponging that a layperson can learn, Lazure is an art. Andrade is part of a group of only three artists in the United States who can perform it. Using a thick brush, Andrade applies three layers of colors, prepared as thin and transparent as watercolor, over a white surface. The white surface behind the Lazure color reflects light back through the layers of glaze, which creates a glow said to having curative qualities.
Andrade does commissions all over the world. He recently “Lazured” the new Basalt Medical Clinic, giving the examination rooms and chemotherapy treatment room the soft peachy-coral hue of healing. For info: lazure.com.
