Art by Children / Modern Art

DAD by Lara -

DAD by Katie -

Montessori school painting -

I have two daughers and both have attended Montessori for pre- school. The teachers provided them with wide brushes and basic color tempera paints. I love the work that they produced...

Paintings by Lara

Paintings by Katie

(Lesson: bright colors are naturally appealing)

"Fold-up" paintings at home -

We would work with the kids to do crafts and painting at home. One of the fun things we did was to let them put paint on the paper in dabs and then fold the sheet in half. Here's a few of the best of those :

(Lesson: bilateral symmetry is almost always appealing)

The other type of "fold-up" painting -

We also used colored glitter with the dabs of glue to make the fold- up paintings:

(do these look like animals or insects? why?)

. . .

the obvious parallels to Modern Art -

wire sculpture by Alexander Calder

painting by Joan Miro

Why is it that children's art is so direct and expressive? Why do we lose that joy as adults when we are more serious? Why do some people say (after seeing Modern Art) - that "my kid could do better than that".

Notice they never say -
"I could do better than that"

to understand more about the psychology of children's art see http://www.users.totalise.co.uk/~kbroom/Lectures/children.htm
. . .