Seurat and Pointillism
Georges-Pierre Seurat
Georges-Pierre Seurat was born in France in 1859, and he died in 1891 when he was only 31 years old. But during his short life, he managed to found a very important artistic movement called “Pointillism”, and he was also known as the father of Post-Impressionism. Impressionism was when artists went outside and painted things spontaneously, looking at how light affected things, and it had a more natural feel than the art that came before it. Post-Impressionism came after that, where artists began thinking about art, color, and light differently, in a more scientific way sometimes. Seurat was fascinated by the sciences of optics and chemistry, and did a lot of experimentation with how the human eye saw color.
Pointillism
Pointillism, the style of painting he became famous for, was one way he played with how the eye sees color. He studied how scientists said colors interacted with each other in our vision, and used dots of colors close to each other to blend colors, rather than blending two different colors of paint on his palette. So instead of just mixing red and yellow to make orange, he would put red and yellow dots close to each other so a person looking at his painting would see orange. Then, in order to make the orange seem more vibrant, he put blue dots, the complementary color of orange, here and there. His paintings were also really big, so that people had to stand back to see them. That way the colors blended in the viewers eyes better. This is his painting, The Circus, which is the very last thing he worked on. You can see how in the clown’s hair, the reds, yellows, and oranges work together with flecks of blue to make his hair brighter.
THE COLOR WHEEL
Seurat worked with the color wheel in order to make his paintings look the way he wanted them too. He knew that the colors opposite each other on the wheel were called complementary colors, which means that they set each other off. They are the colors that look best together. Each primary color (red, blue, and yellow) has a complimentary color that is made of the two opposite colors. So red’s compliment is green (yellow and blue). Blue’s compliment is orange, or red and yellow. Seurat also very rarely used black in his paintings, preferring to make shadows out of different colors, like we saw in the clown’s skin. He used blue and yellow and white to create his shading there. This is part of the science that is called “color theory.”
A fun activity you can do to see which colors compliment each other is this: Hold a red paper against a white background. Stare at the red paper for a long time, 30 seconds or so. Then, pull the red paper away and look at the white background. What color do you see? Usually it’s some shade of green or bluish-green, depending on what shade of red you were looking at! Trying doing the same with other colors and see what colors you end up with.
A SUNDAY IN THE PARK
This painting here is one of Seurat’s most famous. It’s called A Sunday on the Island of la Grande Jatte. You can see he painted it using the Pointillism method. This painting is really big, measuring 10 feet wide. Let’s look at this painting together. What do you see in this painting?
Can you find a monkey? A parasol or umbrella? A sailboat? A man playing a horn? A girl holding flowers?
Does this painting show something that is right now, or something from a long time ago? How can you tell?
Come closer to the painting. How does it look different? Can you see how Seurat’s methods worked?
One thing that Seurat did that was different from many other artists is that he painted a lot of different people in the same scene. Rich and poor people, men and women. This reflected real life, rather than an artist’s idea of what was perfect or ideal.
You Try!
Let’s our hand at painting with dots like Seurat. Start with a simple tree. All you need are light and dark green paint, light and dark brown paint, and some paper. Don’t worry if you can’t paint a good point with a paint brush–you can use q-tips or even your fingertip. Experiment with color a little, and maybe make a couple red dots mixed in with the green for the leaves. Does that make the green more vibrant? It might take you a while to make your tree, but it probably won’t take years like Seurat did with his paintings!