Mommio: Art Class- Mondrian

Today in our Artistic Pursuits class we learned about the abstract artist, Piet Mondrian.

Mondrian grew up in the Netherlands in the late 1800's in a family of artists.  He went to traditional art schools where he studied how to portray landscapes, people and animals as "real".  However, inspired by the cubist movement, Mondrian wished to take his art in another direction.  As he matured he became tired of nature and developed his own ideas of beauty.  He felt that the intellectual side of our minds represented true beauty, and that this should be portrayed with straight lines and primary colors.

We took a look at one of his famous paintings, Broadway Boogie-Woogie 1942, and discussed how the picture portrays the busy streets of New York City.  If you look at the painting closely the squares seem to move and shift much like traffic patterns would.  Modrian's art later had great influence on furniture, housing and clothing designers.  For our Mondrian inspired project the kids did a paper weaving project using black and primary colored paper.  First, the kids folded a piece of black construction paper diagonally and cut off the end to form a square. They folded the square in half and used a ruler to draw a line across the top edge, creating a line they would stop at when cutting.

Next they used a ruler to make straight lines from the fold to the edge line in varying widths and then cut these lines and unfolded the square.

The kids cut strips of primary colors in different widths and then starting weaving them through the slits in the black paper, gluing the ends of each to the black paper and cutting off any extra.  

This simple weaving process created some very nice Mondrian inspired art!