Hearthstone hosts lecture series

Hearthstone hosts lecture series

Hearthstone School is pleased to welcome Mr. David Lowe back to Rappahannock County to continue his popular lecture series begun in 2004. Mr. Lowe, a British art historian, Goethe scholar and anthroposophist, said of his first lecture topic, Goethe in Italy: Weimar to Venice: “Goethe’s celebrated account of his travels in Italy in 1786 are one of the classic accounts of travel. Leaving his friends secretly in the middle of the night, German poet, dramatist and scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe fled south to Italy. His writings are highly significant historically, and more than just an entertaining travelogue.” Some 200 years later, Mr. Lowe and painter Simon Sharp followed Goethe’s journey day-by-day to study how Goethe, out of his experiences of art in Italy, discovered the sequence of metamorphosis in plants, the importance of which is still not generally recognized.

Mr. Lowe said of his second lecture, entitled The £ey to All Life and Art: “Goethe describes the architectural ‘euritmia’ of Palladio as ‘the key to all life and art.’ Taking our start from villas and churches in Venice, we will move via the Palladium, the way plants develop form, the paintings of Turner, and the I Ching to an understanding of gesture and metamorphosis.”

Lowe and Simon have given workshops, lectures and exhibitions of their work in Europe and America, including Oxford University, the British Museum, Rudolf Steiner College in Sacramento, the Edinburgh Festival and the Shenandoah Arts Council. They have a book due to be published this fall on Goethe’s discovery of plant metamorpho*. sis.

The lectures will be held on Wednesday, November 2 and Thursday, November 3, and are free of charge, though donations to cover Mr. Lowe’s expenses are appreciated. Both lectures begin at 8:00 pm in Hearthstone School’s Community Room, and will be illustrated by photos of the paintings created by Simon Sharp on his and Mr. Lowe’s Italian journey.