Our Artist Study Continues:

The children continue to be interested in different types of art and painting. During the fall semester we focused on Joan Miro and created art in his style. The next artist we began to explore was Wassily Kandinsky who is well-known for paintings which contain a variety of shapes. 

 Looking at art for inspiration 


                      

We discussed how we thought the paintings were created and how we could make something similar. The children were very interested in the first painting and thought it looked like "space and planets." Since the children were very excited about the painting on the black background we decided to focus our next art experience on creating our own paintings in a similar style. We talked about what we could use to make the shapes and how the artist was able to put so many colors together without the colors getting mixed up. One of the children suggested that maybe the artist didn't paint all the circles at the same time. "Maybe he let it dry and came back to it a different day?" We decided this was the approach we would take.


Creating our Kandinsky-Inspired Paintings



 We implemented this activity over the course of two weeks since most of the children don't come every day. By waiting a few days, the children were able to revisit their own work and decide if they wanted to keep adding layers to the painting they had already started or begin with a fresh piece of paper. 



Finished Work


Below are a sample of the children's completed paintings. Some of the children were finished after one layer of color, while other children added multiple layers of color, as evidenced by the different color palettes of paint on their paper.





Throughout this process, children strengthened and enhanced many of their developing skills. The children were observing how others used the materials and they went through much trial and error to make the circles crisp and clean. They explored the different prints left behind by the variety of objects we had on the table and then chose one or two which they preferred.  The children also needed to work together to share paint and materials. 

Next Steps


While this part of our Kandinsky study is complete, we are continuing to explore other works of art by Kandinsky, including "Squares with Concentric Circles." 



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