Abstract artists' Kahlo, Dali and Kandinsky

Search for “Abstract Artists.” It was the recent assignment of my Grade 9 daughter in her Music, Art, Physical Education and Health (MAPEH) class. With the help of the internet, research assignments like this come in handy. So let me share with you at least three out of the ten abstract artists she listed in her notebook.

Frida Kahlo

Kahlo is a strong and brave woman who shared in her craft even the saddest and painful ones of her personal experiences. She is a Mexican, she suffered from polio as a child and was in a bus accident as a teenager where she nearly died. She underwent several operations and made painting her pursuit while recovering. She had almost 200 paintings and most of it focused on her life experience: a child, a teenager, a woman and a wife. Her self-portrait “The Wounded Table” in 1940 was not only one of her two largest paintings, but moreover, it showed her pain and disappointment in life, and hatred over her husband Diego Rivera. Currently, her works are being sold at high prices and are on display in the Frida Kahlo Museum in Coyoacan, Mexico.

Salvador Dali

Dali is a prominent, well-rounded Spanish surrealist painter with high imagination, extensive symbolism, extraordinary and extravagant behavior as a person and an artist. His artistic skill was not only limited in paintings, but also stretched out in film, sculpture and photography. He had over 1,500 paintings, produced illustrations for books, lithographs, designs for theater sets and costumes, drawings and sculptures, and other projects. His best known work as a surrealist painter was “The Persistence of Memory” in 1931.

Wassily Kandinsky

Kandinsky is not only known as a great abstract painter, but also with his theoretical writings. A very deep artist and active leader of the abstract movement, he encouraged other artists to create masterpieces not only with what they saw in nature or what surrounds them, but moreover to create something based on inner feeling and emotion as well. His “Blue Rider” in 1903 was one of his most influential creations wherein he left to his viewers’ thoughts what he’s trying to portray in this piece.