Cats a la Klimt

Kindergarten art students just finished up a lesson about the Austrian artist Gustav Klimt. They learned that he not only loved the color gold and swirly lines, but cats too! Inspired by his art, they created cat collages!

Kindergarten Klimts

The Tree of Life


One of my favorite artists is Gustav Klimt and I love teaching about him and his artwork to my Kindergarten students.

Klimt was an animal lover and so that is a great way to begin introducing him to five year olds. There is a cute book called Klimt and His Cat, by Berenice Capatti, that I read to the kids.
In fact, I'm thinking about having the kids draw and paint a cat, "Klimt style" for next year.
I think that might be fun.

This year, the students worked with color, line and shape inspired by Klimt.

So, of course we use a lot of GOLD.

...and SWIRLY lines...

We focus on ovals, circles, squares and rectangles.

We also talk about OVERLAPPING.



And then it is time for them to get started!


To begin, they used silver Sharpie markers to fill their gold paper with swirly lines.



Next, they cut and paste shapes from silver, black and white paper...







They finish by painting more swirls with gold paint.






Here are two finished artworks. The first one is very linear, almost symmetrical. The second one is very expressionistic.

You can see that kids think very differently from each other, even though I am teaching them the same concepts.

That is what makes teaching art so fun!