Mondrian Again

Mondrian-inspired abstract art is, by far, the fastest art project that Tiger has managed to do.  After the previous introductory session, we have been able to do two more projects this week.

The first project's instructions are from Discovering Great Artists.  It is a variation from last week's project in that we used black electrical tape for the initial grid lines on graph paper.

Once Tiger was happy with his black lines, he filled in the rectangles using a variety of medium: wax crayons, felt tip pens, and brush markers.

It took 20 minutes to complete Project 1, so we decided to do another quick one.  Tiger remembered a Mondrian spread from his doodle book:

There was one quick introduction to Mondrian in the book, followed by ready-drawn grids with colour-guide written in selected rectangles.  It was the child's version of painting-by-numbers.  Generally Tiger and I don't think painting-by-numbers or colouring books teach anything useful, but on this occasion Tiger was happy to use the brush pens so he did the exercise anyway.

We went to see the Mondrian Nicholson In Parallel exhibition at Somerset House.  It is a small exhibition so we were able to take our time to slowly go round and look closely at each piece of work.  The exhibition is interesting in that it shows the how Nicholson's work was influenced by his friendship with Mondrian, by placing both artists' works side-by-side.

As a final recap, we listened to both talks on the Smarthistory site on Mondrian.  I just discovered this site, and am very pleased with how comprehensive it is in terms of links and presentation.  We will be using it more in the future.

This post is linked up to several blog hops, where you can visit to see what other homeschoolers have been busy with.  It is also linked to the Carnival of Homeschooling Blog Carnival.