Mondrian Inspired Paintings

After analyzing several works from dutch artist Piet Mondrian, our first graders noticed similar themes through out his work such as the use of rectangles, squares, and a variety of lines.  Additionally, he tended to include the colors red, yellow, blue and sometimes black and/or white.  Next, we compared one of his paintings to one of french impressionist painter Renoir, and discussed how they were different.  Students concluded that Mondrians painting was composed of lines, shapes, and color but nothing from the real work which we defined as NON OBJECTIVE ART.  Moreover, Renoir's painting was depicting people and nature, which is apart of the real world, therefore considered REPRESENTATIONAL ART (trying to represent something such as people, animals, or nature).  After we were able to wrap our heads around these two art concepts, we started to become familiar with the life of artist Piet Mondrian.  

Students learned how Mondrian was from the Netherlands and was introduced to the art world at a very young age by his  father and uncle who were both artists.  Throughout his life he traveled to Paris and New York to further his art career.  Students were excited to find out that Mondrian and three other dutch painters were apart of a special group and journal called De Stijl who advocated for art that was reduced down to the basic essentials of color and form (often times only using the primary colors plus black and white with horizontal and vertical lines).  We compared this to being part of a secret or special club they might have with their friends who share similar interests.   

Piet Mondrian, Boogie Woogie, 1942-1943

Piet Mondrian, Composition No. 2, 1925

To get started on our own nonobjective art, we first focused on LINE and then COLOR.  To increase our line vocabulary, we read the book Follow the Line by Laura Ljungkvist and brainstormed a variety of lines such as dotted, curved, arced, spiral, curly, thick, think, zig-zag, wavy, long, short etc.  To start their paintings, students were going to use black paint and had to paint at least five different types of lines and each line had to touch either a side of the paper or another line.  Students were also given a thin and thick paint brush to help add variety.  On the second day, we discussed why primary colors were SO special and came to the conclusion that although they can make other colors, they are also the ONLY colors that can not be made by mixing any other two colors together.  In Mondrian spirit, we used these colors to fill in the shapes we created the following class by our different lines.  Students were guided to be thoughtful when deciding where to put different colors and which areas they wanted to leave white.  Some students decided to frame the shapes they painted by leaving the outside white, while others incorporated the white of the paper as if it was another color they were painting with.  It was hard to resist but students were told not to mix any colors (because that was for the next class).  See the wonderful results below.  

Student Examples