So if you are family and logging on to see what's up, this video is actually for my abstract art class. It's just an easier way to get to it. Now if only I could remember the password to my Claggett Creek website! Grrr. Too many things in life.

Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky December 1866- December 1944) was a Russian painter, and art theorist. He is credited with painting the first modern abstract works.

Born in Moscow, Kandinsky spent his childhood in Odessa. He enrolled at the University of Moscow and chose to study law and economics. Quite successful in his profession—he was offered a professorship at the University of Dorpat—he started painting studies (life-drawing, sketching and anatomy) at the age of 30.

In 1896 he settled in Munich and studied first in the private school. He went back to Moscow in 1914 after World War I started. He was unsympathetic to the official theories on art in Moscow and returned to Germany. There he taught at the Bauhaus school of art and architecture from 1922 until the Nazis closed it in 1933. He then moved to France where he lived the rest of his life, and became a French citizen. He died at Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1944.

His thoughts on art:

The influence of music has been very important on the birth of abstract art, as it is abstract by nature—it does not try to represent the exterior world but rather to express in an immediate way the inner feelings of the human soul. Kandinsky sometimes used musical terms to designate his works; he called many of his most spontaneous paintings "improvisations", while he entitled more elaborated works "compositions".

Now that we have studies Jackson Pollock and his "action art", as well as Wassilly Kandinsky and his "geometric art" according to the highest form of art, music, we will look at Japanese art. We will use our papers to create a Japanese lotus with the technique called origami. This art form can get extraordinarily complicated. Ours will be a more simplistic set of folds.



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