Art at Benilde-St. Margaret's: Painting I: Realism to Abstraction

The Painting 1 students were assigned to find a chair at home, take a photo and bring it into class to paint.

From the photo, they looked for a strong composition (does it run off the page, is it an unconventional angle, does it fill the frame...?) and painted it as close to life as they could in watercolor. For the second painting, and to better understand the transition into abstraction, we looked at examples of Piet Mondrian. His development into abstraction was built on many paintings and drawings originally done very realistically.

The students then looked at their own chairs and decided how they wanted to abstract and develop their chair paintings. Did they just want to change the color? Did they want to exaggerate the shapes? Is there a pattern on the chair they wanted to continue painting? Their method and extent of abstraction was limitless. See if you can follow what they were thinking from their original painting to their developed and abstracted chair.