Painting like Kandinsky

Another continuation of Cassie Stephens' unit on lines. For this class, we of course had to talk more about lines! We once again practiced making lines with our bodies and with Larry the Line. The kids were really starting to catch onto the names of lines by now. We took a look at some artwork by Wassily Kandsinky. Mr. Kandinsky was a Russian painter who was one of the first people to ever paint abstractly/non-representationally. He was largely influenced by music due to his synesthesia. Synesthesia is a condition in which one of your senses becomes activated due to the stimulation of another sense. So when Kandinsky heard music, he would oftentimes see colors and vice versa. While looking at his work, we tried to see if we could find some of the lines that we had been talking about. After that, because they had shown expertise in the previous class during my guided line drawing, they were allowed to paint whatever kinds of lines they wanted to! Like Kandinsky, we painted to music. The kids were asked to fill their papers with black lines. After the paper had been filled with black lines, they could then paint colors between their lines. While they worked, we listened to "Peter and the Wolf" by Sergei Prokofiev. This selection of music uses a different instrument for each character and allows for the students to interpret the sounds differently.