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.

Lines and space

We are definitely working through a theme of geometry here.  It's all about lines and shapes these days.

Picture Study

This is an introductory lesson I gave Tiger on Piet Mondrian.  At first glance, Mondrian's "grid work" is deceptively simple but obviously there is more to them than random lines and colours.  Once again, I could not find introductory biographies of Mondrian from the library, so I used a combination of the biography found here while looking through his paintings chronologically to give Tiger an idea of how Mondrian's style was influenced by the various art movements during his lifetime.  I feel it is important for Tiger to know that Mondrian was able to paint very well representationally before he turned to simplification and abstraction.

After looking at the printouts on the cupboard door for a while, I asked Tiger for a general narration of what he saw.  He struggled to say anything beyond "straight lines" and "primary colours", so I asked him to imagine how he would describe Mondrian's work to someone who is blind.  That helped.  Tiger managed to expand his description to include:

• no diagonal lines
• only rectangles
• same tonal value in each piece of work
• different spacing between grid lines

Out of all the printouts, Tiger was most attracted by the bright colours of Broadway Boogie Woogie.  He was tickled by its title and was intrigued by the story behind the name.  We watched the following clip to get a better idea:

The clip gave a good overview of Mondrian and his style, highlighting that both the space and the lines are equally important in Mondrian's work.  Tiger had to watch another clip to understand what a Boogie Woogie is:

We watched one more clip that gave a good overview of how Mondrian's style evolved from representational to abstract:

Hands-on project

I modified the lesson plan here slightly for the project.  First, Tiger planned his layout using the pre-cut black strips,bearing in mind the importance of spacing.

Once he was happy with his design, he glued them on and trimmed away the extra bits that were went beyond his white paper.

Next, Tiger had to decide where to put the colours.  I reminded him that Mondrian's choice of colours and spacing was done with careful planning and thought.  Tiger pencilled in his colours.

The final part was to measure the rectangles from the grid, transfer the measurements onto the corresponding coloured construction papers and cut them out.  I helped Tiger with transferring the measurements because this part was somewhat fiddly.  He did the cutting and pasting.

Here is Tiger's first Mondrian-inspired art work.

As he was doing the project, Tiger questioned why he was making a collage rather than painting (since Mondrian's mostly painted).  Good point.  Since he asked, I have other Mondrian projects lined up that will explore other aspects of his work.

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 up to the Charlotte Mason Blog Carnival - Education is a Life! edition.