Art at Hosmer: Abstract Painting with Primary Colors

PK and Kindergarten artists have been learning about our primary colors: red, yellow and blue. We touched on them briefly when we looked at Mondrian's painting to inspire our own collage artworks. This time, we began by looking at paintings by Franz Kline and Wassily Kandinsky to learn about abstract art.

Franz Kline, Mahoning (1956)

Students noticed the lines, shapes, and colors in the artworks. They noticed that sometimes a white triangle reminded them of a mountain, or a yellow circle reminded them of the sun. However, we also noticed that the paintings were not showing us something we immediately recognized. They were not paintings of people, places or things.

Wassily Kandinsky, Composition VIII (1923)

We learned that in abstract art, artists are not trying to show something from the real world. They use lines, shapes and colors to show an idea or feeling. Sometimes they are inspired by music. We talked about why an artist might do this, and some students thought maybe because it is fun, because you can be more free, or because the artist just felt like it. Students painted their own abstract painting, using lines and shapes that we have learned, with black paint. Students left plenty of white space inside and around their shapes.

The following class, we learned about our primary colors. We learned that primary colors are important because you cannot mix other colors to make them, but you can use them together to make new colors. To remember the primary colors, we looked at Superman's logo, because it has the three primary colors and these colors are strong and powerful, like Superman!

Then we used the primary colors to paint inside the shapes and around the spaces in our painting. We focused on washing out our brush in between colors, so that they did not mix.