Georges seurat hi painting
Georges seurat - hi paintingGeorges 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...
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