This animation by South Shields born artist Sheila Graber, shows modernist artist Mondrian's development from reality to abstraction, accompanied by music from the boogie woogie and American jazz era. The film opens as Mondrian, and a black line, descend into the picture. He appears again standing on a black horizontal line pulling at the letter ‘M’ revealing his name. Title: Mondrian He pulls down a red square which covers his name. Then places red and yellow colours separated by a...

This animation by South Shields born artist Sheila Graber, shows modernist artist Mondrian's development from reality to abstraction, accompanied by music from the boogie woogie and American jazz era. The film opens as Mondrian, and a black line, descend into the picture. He appears again standing on a black horizontal line pulling at the letter ‘M’ revealing his name. Title: Mondrian He pulls down a red square which covers his name. Then places red and yellow colours separated by a black line, beneath the black line where he stands. Behind him the picture changes to a red tree on a blue background and the date 1909. The painting is called ‘Avond (Evening) – The Red Tree’ Mondrian pushes the black line near to him and the background changes again, as does the date to 1911, to another early painting called ‘The Grey Tree’ Mondrian climbs the tree, ‘stirs’ the picture with a black line to produce another painting, this time dated 1912 and called ‘The Flowering Apple Tree’. Then black outlined squares appear in his hands and he covers the tree painting to produce a painting from 1913 called ‘Composition in Blue, Grey and Pink’. Mondrian then pushes a black line up towards the top of the picture, then one from left to right to reveal a watercolour and charcoal picture from 1914 called ‘Pier and Ocean’ consisting of varying lengths of horizontal and vertical lines. Mondrian runs to the right of the picture to find himself in amongst blue and red squares. He throws the squares into the 'Pier and Ocean' picture to create his 1917 picture ‘Composition in Colour A’ to which he then adds longer black lines and colours which transforms it into ‘Composition with Grids – Checkerboard’ from 1919. Mondrian appears suspended in outer space with stars and planets in the background. He pulls together more coloured squares and rectangles to produce ‘Composition’ from 1921. The black lines move and the square in which he stands turns onto one of its corners to produce a diamond or lozenge shape. He stands on one of the black lines in a square within the lozenge. The date 1926 appears indicating this picture is ‘Tableau I: Lozenge with Four Lines and Grey’ Mondrian moves the lozenge back to a square with lines. Profiles change from square to lozenge, lines and colours appear and disappear representing paintings from 1930, 1931,1935, 1936. The 1941 painting with coloured grids and squares is called New York City, 1942 produces ‘New York City I’ followed by ‘Broadway Boogie Woogie’, then the ‘Victory Boogie Woogie’ from 1944. Mondrian takes a bow and he and the last painting fragments disappear leaving a view of the stars and planets in space. End Credit: Produced by Sheila Graber