WHS STUDIO ART

“Some say they see poetry in my paintings; I see only science.” –Georges Seurat

The father of Pointillism, Seurat put great effort into his paintings, taking care to place colored dots in a way that would achieve optical unification. If yo...u live in Chicago, you could see the “science” of his masterpiece, “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” in person—if you have an iPad 3, you can see the details using SuperZoom in the artCircles™ for iPad app.

Seurat (1859 – 1891) was born in Paris to a wealthy family, and studied painting and sculpture from a young age. Like many of his famous French contemporaries, his initial works were rejected by the prestigious Paris Salon; Seurat and some friends formed the Society of Independent Artists in 1884, and it was in that environment that he developed pointillism. Many treatises on color, optical effects, and color perception were published during the 19th century, and Seurat internalized these readings and applied them to his art. One of the era’s crucial discoveries was that two colors juxtaposed, when adjacent or overlapping slightly, would have the effect of another color when seen from a distance. Applying these theories to painting was a painstaking (but worthwhile) process, and it took Seurat more than two years to paint “Sunday Afternoon,” which is approximately 6’ x 10’ in size!