Winter Session week one

Design Your Own Calendars & Kandinsky inspired artwork

For our first meeting of the new year and new winter class we made calendars and took a look at some of Wassily Kandinsky artwork. Kandinsky is one of the founders of abstract art, and music and art were inner-related. The idea of abstract art was a new idea to some children so we talked about what made an artwork abstract versus realistic. We introduced children to Kandinsky through his famous artwork called "Farbstudie Quadrate" and "Several Circles" that deals with rhythm, color and geometric shapes.

We used these paintings particularly the first one to recreate there own version by folding their paper canvas into half and thirds to create the individual cells or squares that would house the circles. The children then traced over the folds with crayon and drew nesting circles inside each square. They were then asked to paint with watercolors inside each circle and to not have the same color touching anywhere to help create a balance in their painting. The crayon helps create a barrier for the watercolor paint called "resist". After they finished the class directed exercise they were welcome to continue to paint other watercolor paintings using the same technique or experiment on their own.

The next half of the class we collaged pictures onto the different months. We discussed with the kids what sort of imagery might go with each month from national holidays to seasons. We offered trays of many different images that were month specific or seasonal that they could use or they could free form images as well. The month of January was saved for their Kandinsky inspired painting, which was a nice cover for their 2011 calendars. To finish up the calendar we gave the students a silver star sticker to place on their birthday.

This weeks session the children were able to learn about a historical art figure, learn some new words (such as abstract, geometric, resist (in the art sense), realism/realistic, expressionism, and Wassily Kandinsky), explore with watercolors, thinking about matching season and holidays with months of the year, and have fun in the process.