Abstracted Line Paintings in the Style of Wassily Kandinsky
Students from the Pātangatanga hub visited me in the art room today for their very first lesson of the year. The Pātangatanga students are the newest in the school, some of them have only been at school for a few weeks. We split the students into two groups today. Each group spent half of the day with me in the art room and then the other half with Dianne doing Sustainability activities.
The aim of the lesson today was for the students to identify and explore different types of lines. Line is one of the seven elements of art. The other elements are shape, colour, value, form, texture and space.
I modelled different types of lines including horizontal, vertical, diagonal, zig-zag, curly, loopy and dashed. The students practiced making these lines in different thicknesses using Indian ink. We then had a look at Wassily Kandinsky’s paintings Composition 8, 1923, Blue Painting, 1924 and Three Sounds, 1926. We had a chat about the artworks and the students identified the different types of lines that they could see in his work. I also explained that Kandinsky’s artworks are linked closely to music and that he often used music as subject matter for his paintings. Kandinsky also claimed that he could ‘see’ music and ‘hear’ colour (synesthesia).
We listened to ‘The Flight of the Bumblebee' by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ by Richard Wagner. We talked about what we could hear in the music, how it made us feel and how we could use the different lines that we had practiced to represent what we heard. We listened to the music again, this time while the students painted their expressive black lines.
When the paintings were dry the students painted in between the lines with coloured tempera palette paints. It was fabulous listening to the students naming the types of lines that they were using when painting. I think the finished paintings are absolutely gorgeous and beautifully expressive.
