Intuitive Art: Frankenthaler, Kandinsky, & Pollock
Intuitive and messy go hand in hand in this class so be prepared to take these activities outside and wear clothes you can get paint on!
This class focused on artists who weren’t creating something specific but rather used different techniques to paint however they felt in the moment. Intuition feels like a hard subject to teach to children, but it ended up being one of the best classes we have had — kids are so in tune with how they feel and will express it if they are given the chance.
In the class we started with Wassily Kandinsky, a Russian painter and pioneer of abstract art.
We showed the students the piece above and talked about the emotions the different squares evoked. We tried to stay away from assigning emotions to colors (red to anger, blue to sadness) and instead thought about each square by itself and how it made each individual feel. The students then used pastels to create their own concentric circles and described to the class the emotion they were trying to evoke by their color choices. One of our goals with this simple warm up exercise was to get the students to be thoughtful about the colors they chose — the order they went in, the size of each concentric circle, if they faded into the next, etc.
After the warm-up we came back together to learn about Kandinsky’s synesthesia which means he could hear colors and see sounds which he used by creating several paintings while listening to different songs, such as the one below.
We discussed as a class what the music might have sounded like and what the shapes, symbols, and colors might evoke. The most important thing during discussions like this is to make sure each student knows their personal interpretation is just as possible and correct as anyone else’s — the ambiguity of art and the ability to be intuitive in art making go hand in hand.
Though there were no synesthetes in our classes, we played music for the and had them paint the way the music made them feel. We had paper for each student in the paint room and then played four classical songs with very different feelings to them: The Rite of Spring, Part 2: VI. Sacrificial Dance by Igor Stravinsky, Carnival of the Animas, R 125: Aviary by Camille Saint-Saëns, Claire de Lune by Debussy, Baby Elephant Walk by Henry Mancini (a favorite of the kids’ and of the adults watching the kids), and Gymnopédie №1 by Erik Satie. Each child interpreted the music differently and, in turn, changed the the colors, patterns, and techniques they used with each change in mood and tone in the music.
Helen Frankenthaler, the focus of our biography today, was an abstract expressionist painter from New York City. She made large scale paintings by intuitively pouring thinned paint directly onto the canvas on the floor and moving the paint around from all sides to create fields of translucent color — a method she called soak-stain painting.
She was an active painter for over 60 years and although her style changed as she grew and progressed as an artist she always emphasized spontaneity in her work saying: “a really good picture looks as if it’s happened at once.”
Frankenthaler intuition was her greatest guide in making art. She believed that the paintings she made in which one could tell she labored over where to put the colors and how they should move, those paintings she thought too much about, were usually thrown out by her. The ones that truly captured her meaning were the ones that felt natural and almost accidental.
We read the book Dancing Through Fields of Color which explored Frankenthaler’s life and the ways she thought about and saw and moved through color. It gave the students a great vocabulary for talking about her type of intuitive art, and narrative to follow of how to get in though with their own intuition.
For our activity, and to remove the inhibitions of our young artists, we had them stand on a ladder and pour paint like Helen Frankenthaler.
We used these fluid acrylic paints that were donated to us, but adding water to a tempera or other water based paint so you can pour it will also work perfectly. Frankenthaler used raw canvas, which is what we used, so the colors would really soak in and stain. We would not recommend using paper for this because of that soaking aspect and while untreated canvas is the best a treated canvas would work as well. We once again asked the students to think about how they wanted their colors to mix because the soak staining could easily create brown if they weren’t careful. This activity could be a good time to teach children, if they don’t already know, about warm and cool colors and how they mix to make different colors and how mixing too many of them together can often result in brown. We had them stand on a step stool so that they had less control over where their paint ended up, to give them a feeling for the intuitive accidents that can happen while making art.
We also gave them paddles they used to scrape their paint around to make sure it really soaked into the canvas. Remember to wear a smock or paint clothes for this activity! It is a messy one!
Our final artist was Jackson Pollock (another messy one, we know!). An incredibly famous artist, Pollock was another New York City based painter who painted with his canvas on the ground so he could move around and see and work on his canvas from all sides. Pollock was an abstract painter, similar to Frankenthaler, however, instead of soaking a canvas he thickly piled drips and splashes of paint on his canvas using turkey basters, dried paint brushes, and sticks.
Many people think of, and call, Pollock’s work splatter painting, but that wasn’t really his technique. In this video you can see the methodical way he spreads paint on the canvas, dripping more than splattering as he moves around the sides.
His paint was so thick, in fact, that there are flies and other debris stuck in his paintings that have been there for over 60 years
For this art piece we gathered fun painting implements like long feathers, popsicle sticks, sponge brushes, dried up brushes, spoons, and forks to drip paint all over our canvases. This is probably a good activity to do outside so children don’t have to be afraid of where their paint is going. Pollock used house paint because it was plentiful and cheap, we used tempera paint, and you can use any kind of paint you want that can drip. Don’t be afraid to do a lot of layers to make it thick so you really could get a fly stuck in there (or stick a plastic one on like we did) and then just let it dry outside or on a counter for a few days.
This class was so much fun with our students! They got to think and talk about art in a new way and they learned so much from it. We can already see the theories of intuitive art making their way into the conversations we have with some of our returning students in other classes they are signed up for! Art theory can be daunting to teach, but doing it simply and in terms children will understand will make them love consuming and making art even more.
