Pointillism

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Detail from Seurat's La Parade (1889), showing the contrasting dots of paint used in pointillism.

Main article: Neo-Impressionism

Pointillism is a style of painting in which small distinct points of primary colors create the impression of a wide selection of secondary colors. The technique relies on the perceptive ability of the eye and mind of the viewer to mix the color spots into a fuller range of tones, and is related closely to Divisionism, a more technical variant of the method. It is a style with few serious practitioners, and is notably seen in the works of Seurat, Signac, and Cross. The term itself was first coined by art critics in the late 1880s to ridicule the works of these artists, and is now used without its earlier mocking connotation.

The practice of Pointillism is in sharp contrast to the more common method of blending pigments on a palette or using the many commercially-available premixed colors. It is analogous to the CMYK or four-color printing process used by personal color printers and large presses, and to the process used by computer monitors and television sets to produce colors.

[edit] Theory

Viewed from a certain distance, the points or dots in a pointillist painting can no longer be distinguished, and blend optically into each other. This means that with the same set of primaries, pointillists generate a different range of colors when compared to artists using traditional colors or color-mixing techniques. The result is sometimes described as brighter or purer since the eye does the mixing and not the brush. An explanation for this could be sought in the subtractive and additive theories of color, but more reasonably in the simultaneous contrasts.

One of Seurat's sketches for Grand Jatte, 1888

When colours are derived from pigments being mixed physically, subtractive color is at work, merciless. Therefore, every mixture of primary pigments produces less light: if some kind of subtractive primaries, pigments tending to red, blue or yellow are mixed, the colour deriving will be close to black or a "natural" grey, deep and dark.^[1]

There is probably only one way to keep them bright and clear to suggest more light: to separate the "hues" from the "shades".^[2]

[edit] Practice

If red, blue and green light are mixed (the additive primaries) we get something close to white light. The brighter effect of pointillist colours could rise from the fact that subtractive mixing is avoided and something closer to the effect of additive mixing is obtained even through pigments.

The brushwork used to perform pointillistic color mixing is at the expense of traditional brushwork which could be used to delineate texture. Color television receivers and computer screens, both CRT and LCD, use tiny dots of primary red, green, and blue to render color, and can thus be regarded as a kind of pointillism.

Paul Gauguin, who had disliked Seurat ever since a quarrel, referred in a derogatory manner to Seurat's technique as 'petit-point'.^[3]

(See Georges Seurat for information on the scientific influences on pointillism.)

[edit] Resources

[edit] Notes

1. ^ This is a simple experiment for everyone interested in colour theory to demonstrate that the pigments artists use have nothing in common with additive color theory based on the mixing of light.
2. ^ Charles Blanc: Grammaire des Arts
3. ^ Martin Gayford, The Yellow House, page 125. Fig Tree, Penguin, 2006. ISBN 0-670-91497-5

[edit] References

[edit] See also

• Neo-Impressionism
• stippling