1/30/13: Not just Dots
A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La
Grande Jatte, Georges Seurat
What
makes this work so interesting is that from a first glance, it looks almost
like it’s been printed off a computer.
Seurat’s style involved two distinct techniques that pervaded his works;
namely, divisionism and pointillism.
Divisionism involves putting two colors in such close proximity that they
seem to create a single hue. Pointillism
is a way of applying paint to the surface with small dots made by a small
brush. This is what gives the painting
its appearance as well as makes it so that there are no brush strokes in the
painting. As one might imagine, the
painting took a long time to paint, taking Seurat over 2 years to paint. During that time, he had to consider the
viewers distance from the painting, which (being a work of Impressionism) meant
he had to adjust the light in the work.
What is interesting is that unlike other works, this work has the
majority of light in the background, while most of the dark hues are focused in
the foreground. This creates a cool
effect of being able to see far off into the distance with clarity and gives
the whole work a depth usually only seen in landscape paintings.
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