Interest In Using Pointillism

I have always been interested in the use of pointillism since painting my name in graffiti style in year 8. Whilst everyone else was stuck on tonal graduating with colour pencils, I wanted to think outside of the usual way we express ourselves through art and decided to use thick, colourful acrylic paint applied with a stippling stick to create a widely textured and unique piece. Whilst it took a great deal longer than anybody else’s pieces, the tactile quality of the placement of microscopic dots to create tone to me, seemed more effective than any piece blended with a pencil could.

From that initial step into pointillism even before I knew it was called pointillism I knew it would be a technique I would use in my A levels by looking at many different artists from the 19th century to present day I have a wide range of knowledge regarding how pointillism has changed over time.

To start my research began with the most famous of the Pointillists, Georges Seurat; a French artist who lived during the late 19th century.

During his tragically short life – he died at age 31 – he served as one of the true pioneers of Pointillism. He combined considerable mastery of chromoluminarism, the practice of leaving white spaces on the canvas between the dots, to create a level of light that was otherwise impossible. Among his most famous works, and my favourite piece of his, is ‘A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Grande Jatte’ (1884-1886) as seen in image 1.

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While the images may look artificial, the colour leaps off the canvas, relaying the summer hue that glides across the painting. For example, the increase of space in between the dots, particularly in the light-lit leaves of the trees and the reflections in the lake (shown in figures 2 and 3), create an illusion of light that could not be realistically, yet discreetly shown in block colour.

Seurat did many studies previous to the final piece, he did this in order to explore which colours to use when experimenting the technique of optical colour mixing; again looking at the lake, we can see he has used green, yellow, blue and white dots to make a unique colour composition for water, whereas other artists would use a range of blue shades. The combination of warm and cool tones (yellow and blue) give a sense of place to the painting. The Post Impressionists were independent artists at the end of the 19th century who rebelled against the limitations of Impressionism to develop a range of personal styles that influenced the development of art in the 20th century. The major artists associated with Post Impressionism were Paul C?zanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent Van Gogh and Georges Seurat. C?zanne was an important influence on Picasso and Braque in their development of Cubism. Van Gogh’s vigorous and vibrant painting technique was one of the touchstones of both Fauvism and Expressionism, while Gauguin’s symbolic colour and Seurat’s pointillist technique were an inspiration to Les Fauves.

Fauvism was an early 20th-century movement in painting begun by a group of French artists and marked by the use of bold, often distorted forms and vivid colors. Fauvist paintings were characterised by an emphasis on the use of unmixed bright colours for emotional and decorative effect. This image by Andr? Derain, 1906, called Charing Cross Bridge, London shows how Seurat had a large impact on the movement, the use of spaced out, un-mixed colours in dots/lines over bold colours. However, Seurat was much more reserved with his colours and painted minute dots to create more realistic paintings. Even though in the mid- late 19th century paintings and life in general was much more reserved, art showed what was in front of the artist or what they imagined something to look like, whereas in later years, for example the painting by Derain, whilst still showing what he’s looking at, also gives a hint at what he wants to represent through the image, rather than simply copying a landscape.

Another remarkable pointillist artist I have studied is Paul Signac, a French Neo-Impressionist painter who, working with George Seurat, helped develop the pointillist style. Under Seurat’s influence he abandoned the short brushstrokes of Impressionism to experiment with precisely juxtaposed small dots of pure colour, projected to combine and blend not on the canvas but in the viewer’s eye, the defining feature of Pointillism. This technique of slightly thick, small strokes of the paintbrush can be seen in figure 6. Signac based the majority of his work on the French coast as he enjoyed painting the water; as seen in image 5. Whilst Derain ventured far away from Seurat’s clean, precise style, Signac, even though he was painting twenty years later, his style is much more similar to Seurat’s work of the 1880’s.

Slightly more scientific approach influenced by the fast pace of modern life was adopted by Severini. He was an Italian painter and a leading member of the Futurist movement. For much of his life he divided his time between Paris and Rome. During his career he worked in a variety of media, including mosaic and fresco, which techniques expanded upon the idea of images made up of dots, blocks or individual colours. Gino Severini was trained under Giacomo Balla in pointillism, and in 1906 travelled to Paris to learn more about Seurat’s style. Seurat’s influence shines through in Severini’s earlier paintings, for instance in figure 6. Four years later, Raoul Dufy introduced him to scientific Divisionism – the idea that pigments could be mixed optically.

Severini signed the Futurist Manifesto in 1910, and joined the movement in 1911, however, he abandoned Futurism in 1916 and joined the Cubist movement. Vibration and interaction of colour. Deriving from Impressionist masters, pointillism relies on using tiny dots of colours to create depth in a work of art. By doing so, the artist is able to create incredibly subtle variations in colour that would have appeared otherwise clumsy. Especially popular during the 19th century, the style is considered part of the Post-Impressionist period, a movement that continued many of the ideals of Impressionism; the ability of the artist to place what appears in the mind’s eye on canvas.