Fifth graders looked at the work of Wassily Kandinsky. Kandinsky is considered the very first pure abstract painter. We looked at a few of his pieces over the course of his artistic career to see how he kept pushing his subject matter, creating more and more abstract images. In the final image of the below gallery, Kandinsky no longer painted from what he saw, but from what he heard.
We mirrored Kandinsky's techniques and created our own pure abstract music paintings. The first day we listened to two different pieces of music. The first song was a very classic Nutcracker.The second song is a much more modern dubstep song called Stardust.The students listened for a minute with their eyes closed. After the minute, students used crayons to recreate the mental visual of the music using simple lines and shapes in one color.
The students then used watercolors to being adding color to their mental images. Students learned about wax resist and were able to see it in action first hand when they started their watercolor additions. We continued to listen to the music while we worked over the course of two class periods.One painting will turn into the cover of the student's sketchbook and the other will be made ready for display.