Abstract art uses a visual language of shapes, colours, forms, and lines to create compositions that express ideas, emotions, or pure visual experiences. As abstraction moves away from realistic depiction and recognizable objects, it seeks to evoke feelings and moods rather than showing a narrative. Abstract art can range from geometric abstraction (like Piet Mondrian), to gestural abstraction (like Jackson Pollock) and lyrical abstraction (like Joan Miro). 

With compositional abstract art as the main objective, our Gr.6-8 artists began their winter term with a deep dive into Lyrical vs Geometric Abstraction. Using the works of Joan Miro and Piet Mondrian as a source of inspiration, students divided their paper into two windows, using one to create a free flowing composition of lines and shapes dancing through the paper (lyrical abstraction), while the other window was used to showcase a grid-like style of art (geometric abstraction).

About the artists: Miro's most notable work introduced the audience to a visual language composed solely of abstract shapes. He would find the starting point for a painting in an accidental drip of paint or the smudge of a fingerprint, and from there build a composition that synthesized shape, colour and line in an attempt to capture the innocence of childhood. Around the same time that Miro developed his own language of mysterious signs using bold and energetically vibrant colours, Mondrian was also painting alongside abstract artists. However, for him, abstract painting was a way of achieving a balance between the 'concrete' (the tangible and specific aspects of reality) and the 'universal' (the underlying, essential truths that he believed were constant and unchanging in all humanity). To reach this balance, Mondrian decided to approach art differently as he created a visual language of rectangular planes rendered in primary colours and divided by a grid of jet-black lines. While both Miro and Mondrian approached abstract art differently, their aim was to achieve a sense of hope, faith, and beauty in a world consumed with war and hatred.

Featured below are two abstract artworks by ArtVenture students: Stella L & Yongtae K