Improved Senior Project Idea

When we were asked to bring in a subsidiary for our senior project idea, I chose to bring in an example of a painting of pointillism. I chose an ordinary and familiar object, and one that contains my favorite color - a rubber duck. I printed out the image in a 15x15 cm square (1st image above). From this image, I created a grid and created the same illustration but made from hundreds of dots using the pointillism technique (2nd image)

When I brought this subsidiary to class, people were interested in it and wanted to see more of this image. The idea of seeing the same rubber duck but several times its size, was brought up. I liked this idea and thought it would be interesting to make this image human sized.

I realized that by carrying out this idea, I would be combining my first 2 ideas for my senior project - blowing something out of proportion and pointillism.

Right now, I am thinking to chose an object (perhaps the same rubber duck) that can be held in ones hand and blowing it out of proportoin to make it human sized using pointillism.

Paul Signac

Paul Victor Jules Signac was born in Paris on November 11, 1863 into the family of a well-to-do master harness-maker.
He started his career in architecture, but abandoned this at the age of 18 to pursue a career as a painter. He sailed around the coasts of Europe, painting the landscapes he encountered. He also painted scenes of cities in France in his later years.
In 1884 he met Monet and Georges Seurat. He was struck by the systematic working methods of Seurat and by his theory of colors and became Seurat's faithful supporter. Under his influence he abandoned the short brushstrokes of impressionism to experiment with scientifically juxtaposed small dots of pure color, intended to combine and blend not on the canvas but in the viewer's eye, the defining feature of pointillism.

Above is one of Signacs most famous works - The Port of Saint Tropez (1901).

Estimated Schedule for Senior Project

The following is a list of dates and goals I have in order to finish my senior project:

Sept 20 - Create example of final senior project
Oct 5 - Chose object, begin sketching on the board
Oct 7 - Final sketch should be done, begin painting
Oct 21 - 1/4 of painting should be completed
Nov 11- 1/2 of painting should be completed
Dec 25 - 1/3 of painting should be completed
Dec 9 - painting should be more or less completed, begin thinking how it will be displayed and buy display material
Dec 16 - painting should be FULLY completed
Dec 18 - Exhibition

Modern Pointillism

By the early 20th century, artists such as Henri Matisse (1839-1954) claimed that color and form could only achieve their full potential if they become independent from the objects they depicted. Importantly, modern artists emphasized the view of each individual artist, and hence, vision. Matisse’s colors are not arbitrary. Woman with the Hat combines pointillist color with a post-impressionistic technique. Matisse had studied Paul Signac’s use of pure color and his organization of the picture plane through contrasting complementary pairs. In doing so, Matisse creates an energetic, even a tense effect. The pairs of complimentary color are repeated in different parts of the painting. While they structure the work, they also encourage the movement of the spectator’s eye that does not stop at any given point. However, in the process, Matisse moves away from Signac’s pointillist dot. His thick and flat contours borrow from the post-impressionists painters such as Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh rather than from Signac. Thus, for a contemporary spectator, Matisse’s Woman with the Hat appeared less finished than Signac’s painstakingly detailed technique of pointillism. Understanding color and vision helps to explain the work by Matisse and other modern artists.

Georges Seurat

George Seurat is a French painter and the founder of Neo-Impressionism. He is well known for his pointillism works. His large work Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte is one of the icons of 19th century painting. It shows people of all different classes in a park. The tiny juxtaposed dots of multi-colored paint allow the eye of the viewer to blend colors optically, rather than having the colors blended on the canvas or pre-blended as a material pigment. It took Seurat two years to complete this ten foot wide painting, and he spent much time in the park sketching to prepare for the work (there are about 60 studies). It is now exhibited in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Another famous painting of Seurats is La Parade (1889) a painting in which the detail once again shows pointillism technique.

Instead of painting outlines and shapes with brush strokes and areas of color, pointillism builds up the image from seperate colored dots of paint. From a distance, the dots merge and appear to be areas of shaded tones, but the colors have an extra vibrancy from the juxtaposition of contrasting dots.

Scientific Backgrounds and Influences - Eugene Chevreul

Chevreul was perhaps the most important influence on artists during the 19th century; his great contribution was producing the color wheel of primary and intermediary hues.

Chevreul was a French chemist who restored old tapestries. During his restorations of tapestries he noticed that the only way to restore a section properly was to take into account the influence of the colors around the missing wool; he could not produce the right hue unless he recognized the surrounding dyes. Chevreul discovered that two colors juxtaposed, slightly overlapping or very close together, would have the effect of another color when seen from a distance. The discovery of this phenomenon became the basis for the Pointillist technique of the Neoimpressionist painters.
Primary: Yellow, Blue, Red
Secondary: Orange, Green, Violet
Intermediary: Red-Orange, Yellow-Orange, etc.
Chevreul also realized that the 'halo' that one sees after looking at a color is actually the opposing, or complementary, color. For example: After looking at a red object, one may see a green echo/halo of the original object. This complementary color (as an example, green for red) is due to retinal persistence. Neoimpressionist painters interested in the interplay of colors made extensive use of complementary colors in their paintings. In his works Chevreul advised artists that they should not just paint the color of the object being depicted, but rather they should add colors and make appropriate adjustments to achieve a harmony. It seems that the harmony Chevreul wrote about is what Seurat came to call 'emotion'.

What is Pointillism?

Pointillism is a style of painting in which small distinct points of primart colors create the impression of a wide selection of secondary and intermediate 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 connation.
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. The latter is analogous to the CMYK or four-color printing process used by personal color printers and large presses; Pointillism is not analogous to the colors and process used by computer monitors and television sets to produce colors; the latter uses green and no yellow at all to produce colors from green through orange as well as gray, brown and black.
If red, blue and green light (the addictive primaries) are mixed, the result is 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.