“Art Opens Our Eyes to the Spiritual World”

“Temple Veil” by Marion Donehower

**An Interview with Artist Marion Donehower from Stil Magazine**

Chers amis,

Marion Donehower is a member of the leadership group of the North American Section for the Literary Arts and Humanities of the School for Spiritual Science and she helped plan our North American Section Conferences in 2024 and 2025. She is also a member of the Section for Visual Arts.

Her interview appeared in the 2025 summer issue of Stil Magazine, an issue with the title “Art and Healing.” Stil is a German-language publication, but the English translation of Marion’s interview is included here, along with photos of the article in German and a link to the German article PDF. Click here for information on Stil Magazine.

Marion facilitates our North American Section’s Groupe Fairytale, and she is also a performer. You can sample some of her work with Rilke’s poetry here; or click here if you want to enjoy Marion reading the Novalis fairytale Atlantis with Section artists Margit Ilgen and Patricia Dickson; or click here to enjoy her performance of Hermann Hesse’s art fairytale Piktor’s Metamorphosis in English or German.

“ART OPENS OUR EYES TO THE SPIRITUAL WORLD”
A CONVERSATION WITH MARION DONEHOWER

**ORIGINAL INTERVIEW IN GERMAN IN STIL MAGAZINE; SUMMER, 2025**

Click here to view a German PDF of Marion’s Interview & Artwork

You were born and raised in Germany, went to the US after school, then to Japan, and now you live in the US again. How do these three countries play a role in your life story?

I was born in Germany. However, I have always been interested in Japan because I grew up Buddhist. My father often visited the first German Buddhist center in Hamburg, the “Haus der Stille” (House of Silence), and I accompanied him. So even as a child, I often attended Dharma lectures and learned about the Buddhist path to inner peace. My mother called herself a “Goethean Taoist.” She hiked a lot with me and showed me nature, but she never knew the names of the plants. She also loved to play the violin and was sad that I didn’t want to play an instrument. There was always discussion in my parents’ house. Existential questions were the order of the day, and my father was also a follower of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and was very enthusiastic about art. I was fascinated by these conversations and learned early on that books held great secrets. But of course I was a child, and a child who loved movement, who loved gymnastics and horseback riding.

In the 1960s, as a young social worker, I was searching for a meaningful life. I had heard about Tai Chi, a Chinese movement art, and had been introduced to Aikido, a newer Japanese spiritual movement art. Sitting meditation did not appeal to me, but meditating in motion touched me immediately. It was clear: this was what I was looking for, this was my life. After a year, when I had saved enough money, I went to Honolulu, Hawaii, where I practiced Tai Chi every day in a Buddhist temple. On my way back to Hamburg, I stopped in Boston, as Boston was the world center for macrobiotics at the time and I was very interested in Japanese macrobiotics as taught by Georges Osawa and other Japanese teachers. T.T. Liang, an important Tai Chi teacher, lived in Boston. I became his student and then taught there myself. I met my husband, Bruce Donehower, here; he was my student. He got a job as a lecturer at a language school in Japan. So I suddenly found myself in the middle of Japan, in Hamamatsu. On the shelves of the apartment where we lived, I found only Japanese books. , the only English books available were by Rudolf Steiner. I started reading and couldn’t stop. I felt very foreign in Japan, isolated, and Rudolf Steiner’s texts made it all the more clear to me that I am European. And yet, a connection to Japan has developed that continues to this day. You can see that in my paintings.

After a year, we returned to the US and moved to Fair Oaks in California. That was in 1982! Fair Oaks had a college for training Waldorf teachers, a Waldorf school, an anthroposophical medical clinic, and shops. It was (and still is) a real anthroposophical village.

When did painting come into your life? Are the paths there as winding as the paths to your place of residence?

In Hamburg, I lived with artists and was married to a student who was a pupil of Joseph Beuys. I had never thought about painting myself. I knew all the most important galleries in Europe and had deepened my understanding of art, but I only discovered painting at the Rudolf Steiner College in Fair Oaks. Ted Mahle, a student of Beppe Assenza, awakened my joy in painting.

Later, I took a four-year seminar with a well-known layer painter, which wasn’t easy for me. I liked the watercolors, but I suddenly had to tame them and become pedantic. This technique seemed immobile and stiff to me—I felt insecure!

However, my most important teacher in bringing together the threads of aikido and painting was brain surgery. During aikido training, a young man I was teaching threw me so hard to the ground that I suffered a concussion. A doctor then diagnosed me with an acoustic neuroma, a benign tumor on the auditory nerve. After it was removed, I lost my balance and could only hear in one ear. I had to learn to walk again and could no longer use my right arm, and I could neither write nor paint. I had to start from scratch, like a small child.

I then started painting with my left hand, learned to walk again, and very carefully began practicing aikido with my husband’s help. It was through these physical limitations that I discovered my art.

You like to experiment in your paintings. How does the painting process work?

I have a large box with lots of paper. It contains Japanese paper, handmade paper, wrapping paper, but also Tibetan flags, thin Indian fabrics—anything that can be glued to a canvas. I often start by making a collage on the canvas with the paper, for example with three pieces of paper, either torn or cut, which are then glued closely together so that they partially overlap. I paint over some of the paper, either partially or completely. Other areas are just colored, or I use only one or two colors. Then I add another layer of paper. Gradually, the image emerges from the layers of paper and paint. Sometimes I add Indian fabric or a Tibetan flag, which I can remove again to create color patterns. This means that a picture always turns out to be a surprise, which I am delighted about. My smaller pictures, which I don’t paint on canvas, often depict landscapes that are much simpler in design and into which I often insert Japanese characters. They are graphically very beautiful and convey a spiritual mood.

I have also worked with monoprints or “monotypes.” An art teacher in Berkeley has a huge printing press. The weight of the press and the use of oil paints make the images incredibly vivid. The first print is called a mono, and the second print is very faint in color, but sometimes even more beautiful. Of course, I can’t resist reworking them after they dry.

I have recently started experimenting with watercolors. There is something gentle about the flow of the colors, and the smaller format I use seems to suit me better now.

Have you also explored Rudolf Steiner’s art impulse?

Personally, I’m less interested in that. That’s also a bit due to my character. I’m a little stubborn. If someone says to me, “You can’t paint acrylic on oil paints, it won’t work and it looks awful!” then my automatic reaction is, “It’ll work, let’s see!” And of course it works. I have to try everything out for myself, in a ” ” way, before I can accept things. I naturally became familiar with Rudolf Steiner’s artistic impulse through my teachers, followed them as far as necessary, but then broke free from it. I only began to take an interest in Rudolf Steiner and his statements about art, his approaches to painting, once I had found my own way.

Are there any particular events or situations that trigger the painting process for you?

I believe there has to be a cheerful mood. The whole ethereal space around me has to be right. A few years ago, I bought myself three Native American flutes. They are wonderful for putting me in a calm, relaxed state. Every note penetrates the body; I play every day. In this mood, it is easy to concentrate on my work. My inner balance is restored.

Is everything always harmonious, or are there also crises?

Of course there are crises. With larger pictures, I always have a total crisis! After many hours of work, I suddenly realize that nothing is working. But there is this one little corner that I find absolutely perfect. I have to save that corner! Then I try to change the picture to integrate that spot. I don’t notice that I’m working myself into despair. But I don’t give up easily. Sometimes it takes a long time before I have to give up. It’s a huge relief then—just like in life. It’s that moment when you can breathe again and let go. A walk is in order. It was exhausting.

I would like to come back to the connection between aikido, anthroposophy, and art. What are the connecting lines or intersections for you?

The intersection is the lemniscate. The lemniscate is fundamental to aikido, tai chi, and art. We can discover the movement of the lemniscate again and again. Be it in music, language, or even painting. Especially when I work with watercolors, I can easily recognize and feel the movements of the lemniscate when the colors express themselves.

When I studied anthroposophy, I recognized the universality that lies in the lemniscate as an image of a bridge and inversion. In a wide variety of contexts, Rudolf Steiner develops the transition from one world to another, from waking to sleeping, from sleeping to waking, from life to death and back to life, whereby it is not only the transitory that is decisive, but above all the passage through the zero point, the nothingness. It is a process of inversion that takes place. And this is exactly what happens in art.

In anthroposophy, we speak of creation out of nothing. This concept also exists in Buddhism, although it is referred to as “emptiness” rather than “nothingness.” But just as nothingness is not nothing, emptiness is not a void, but a fertile field of endless creative possibilities waiting to be born. In English, we speak of “endless conditional arising.” In a therapeutic sense, one could also speak of the “dark night of the soul.” When we awaken from this night and pass through the gate, we have the opportunity to discover a path to new experiences and thoughts.

In painting, I experienced the transition during a crisis, and after this crisis, a new beginning opened up. In aikido, the zero point can be found in the breathing process. The body’s movements and breathing float between relaxed and tense harmony – it is a long path of practice that one must follow to achieve this state.

What project are you currently working on or would you like to work on in the future?

Today is the first morning of 2025 – a good day to think about what my plans are!

For now, I will work with watercolors and learn to master my Japanese paper. Then I plan to create a large series of very small pictures, just 15 x 15 cm in size. I will glue them onto Japanese paper and paint over them with watercolors. Then I have a larger collaborative project in mind, which I will work on together with others. We want to glue the scraps of paper and other so-called waste onto a very large canvas in my studio, paint over them, and create a collective collage.