Mondrian & Maths

One way to help learners see the maths around us is through exploring visual art. Often learners see art as it stands and look past the value mathematics can bring to an art piece. In my numeracy class at OJC we explored Piet Mondrian and his artworks as they changed over the years. Learners engaged in key vocabulary to do with the art pieces alongside key mathematical vocabulary with particular focus on fractions.

In his more recent artworks, Piet Mondrian would use only primary colours and set geometric shapes - predominantly rectangles and black perpendicular lines. Using this as a base for our inspiration, we began to explore our understanding of fractions by discussing proportions covered by different colours in a given art piece, then converting these into equivalent fractions, then simplified fractions.

Learners set about unpacking different Piet Mondrian artworks and responding to them with their fraction knowledge. This in turn helped inspire the learners to create their own Mondrian inspired artwork using Google Slides and simple ‘shapes’, colours and lines.

📣 About the author
Katie joins the Artelier H³ team and brings with her a wealth of knowledge and experience in curriculum design in numeracy. Her dedication in influencing maths mindset is seen in her everyday practice with engaging learning experiences such as this gem!

🔥 The Art Bonfire

Modernism into Abstract Art is mostly concerned with the universal truth. The truth of human expressions and of beauty, that is at its utmost equilibrium of the whole. (Abstract) Art is relationships - between the objective and the subjective, the individual and the universal, the nature and the plastic. By purposefully organising the fundamental essence of painterly means such as colours, forms, lines, and planes, we have arrived at a perfect (new) harmony.. it all sounds quite zen, doesn't it? Imagine this taking place during the turbulence of World War I.

De Stijl: 'Manifesto 1'

"IIIC Abstraction and Form." Art in Theory 1900-2000: an Anthology of Changing Ideas, by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (ed.), Blackwell Publishing, 2014, p. 281.

Such changing times and full of optimism! To some degree, I feel we may be going through similar human experiences in the face of an international health crisis, composing a post-Covid new world..

📦 Bonus Skill
What is the universal language of truth (apart from art)? Yeah, maths! The seemingly simple arrangement of colour planes in Mondrian's work has inspired many! The complex 'intuitively calculated' relationships of ratio and area are what make it aesthetically just when dividing a canvas into sections. Mondrian described Abstract Painting as the product of deeper feeling and deeper intellect ("Dialogue on the New Plastic", 1919):

When feeling is deepened, in many eyes it is destroyed. That is why the deeper emotion of the New Plastic is so little understood. But one must learn to see Abstract-Real painting, just as the painter had to learn to create in an abstract-real way. It represents the process of life that is reflected in the plastic expression of art. [...] art and life are one; art and life are both expressions of truth.

Did I just side-track it back to life again?

After a bit of exploration, learners can go deeper into investigating the Mondrian Riddle, designed by MathPickle founder Gordon Hamilton, 2015. Here's how:

The canvas must be entirely covered by non-overlapping rectangles.
All rectangle edge lengths must be whole numbers.
No two rectangles can have the same dimensions.
Your score is the difference between the area of the largest rectangle and the area of the smallest.
Try to make your score as small as possible.