Kandinsky Circles

 Wassily Kandinsky was a Russian born artist who led a movement of expressionist artists in Munich in 1911. The group's name, The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter), was named after one of Kandinsky's paintings. He had a degree in law. He also had synesthesia, which is a condition in which senses overlap. He could see sound and hear color. Monet's paintings of haystacks made music for him. His paintings represented sounds: dark blue would represent the sound of an organ while a light blue would represent flutes.

Because my students are blind or visually impaired, the idea of visual art representing sound and visa versa is interesting to them. They made "chords" of color in their Kandinsky style color circle paintings. His famous color study of circles was one of his most famous pieces. This assignment was a nice way to talk about the properties of watercolor, and what happens when you let one color bump up against another wet color and as opposed to layering edges with a dry, for example. What happens if a dark color is next to a light color? And what about color relationships and composition? How do you keep the cool and warm colors evenly distributed? What happens if you don't? 

This project was another part of our unit on Expressionism that didn't take more than a couple class periods, but left them with pieces that were fun to make and fun to view.