George Seurat And Hi Painting Essay Research

George Seurat And Hi Painting Essay, Research Paper

Georges Seurat used the pointillism approach and the use of color to make his painting, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, be as lifelike as possible. Seurat worked two years on this painting, preparing it woth at least twenty drawings and forty color sketched. In these preliminary drawings he analyzed, in detail every color relationship and every aspect of pictorial space. La Grande Jatte was like an experiment that involved perspective depth, the broad landscape planes of color and light, and the way shadows were used. Everything tends to come back to the surface of the picture, to emphasize and reiterate the two dimensional plane of which it was painted on. Also important worth mentioning is the way Seurat used and created the figures in the painting.

The famous painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte was painted between 1885-1886. The subject is an island newly adopted by the Parisian middle class as a place for quiet Sunday gatherings. The painting looks very realistic. The figures and the way they are dressed look lifelike as does the beautiful landscape in the background. The colors and the painting style, pointillism, make this painting very realistic. The question is, how does Seurat go about making the painting look so lifelike.

Pointillism was a major reason in why Seurats painting looks so lifelike. During the painting of La Grande Jatte, Seurat simplified his brushwork to such an extent that his painting seems to be composed of nothing but tiny, more or less circular dots. Seurat s experiments with color led him to paint in small dots of color which are arranged in such combinations that they seem to vibrate. Individual colors tend to interact with those around them and fuse in the eye of the viewer. This approach is not unlike the dots or pixels in a computer image. If you magnify any computer image sufficently, you will see individual colors that, when set together, produce an image. Seurat was interested in the way colors came about. With the enhancement of the luminousity of colors made possible by the investigation of scientific optics, he saw positive merit in a method in which the movement of the brush no longer demanded the slightest skill: Here the hand is, in effect, useless, deceit impossible; no room for bravura items; let the hand be awkward, but let the eye be agile, perspective and skilled.

Seurat used earth colors in many of his previous works, prior to La Grande Jatte. Seurat used burnt sienna and light ochre in his previous painting entitled, Une Baignade. However, during his first phrase of work on La Grande Jatte, he abandoned only the ochre, not the burnt sienna. Seurat seemed to have given up these pigments quite gradually, just as increasingly renounced underpainting, ulimately allowing the white canvus to show through between the dots of color.

There is a mysterious vibration when one views La Grande Jatte. There is an effect of the paintings surface when ones eye glides inevitably from dot to dot. This lets the eyes carry from the people located in the foreground to the beautiful landscape in the background. However, J.C Webster rightly sees the actual charm of Pointillism in the awareness with which the colors can be seen, precisely because they do not merge unconciously on the retina, Finally, as regards to the overall effect of color in a given area, it seems to me that what takes place when touches one color are introduced into an area of another color, or when touches of two colors are set side by side, is not retinal fusion, but rather a kind of mental(not visual) averaging, for the area involved, of the colors or their values. That is, if some touches of ultramarine are introduced into an area of yellow, we see both sets of touches, but we apprehend the area as having so much blue in it, or being so much darker in this case. This is a process of the mind rather than of the retina . That is why La Grande Jatte, seen at close range, appears more interesting in color than from a distance. Paul Signic noticed this when the picture was exhibited in Brussels in the spring of 1887 and than wrote to Pisarro: In my opinion La Grande Jatte loses a little in this large hall. There is a certain amount of needless work which disappears at the distance. Once feels where it was impossible to stand back. Of course this minute division, exquisite in canvases of about 8 to 50, become too mean for a large canvas of several meters.

Clearly Seurat was particularly concerned with the coloring of the painting. The landscape was something that Seurat concentrated hardly on. Before the final painting, he made a large canvas painting of the landscape without people, which Seurat exhibited in December 1884. The shadow zones are dark, blue-green, almost turqoise. Originally this picture was executed in small strokes, laid over each other in cross hatchings. Later, however. It was reworked in many places in the pointillist techniques. Contemporary ctitics, who certainly recognized a certain distance from Impressionism in the dwork, hardly noticed how highly composed the landscape was. Seurat had, so to speak, passed the general inspection. However, an Impressionist would have avoided certain freedoms with perspective which on crtic did notice the foreground is not stable. On the left of the painting the water is not supported; the