George and his Dots

George Pierre Seurat is truly an amazing painter. Many of his prestigious art forms started new phases of art. After painting “Sunday Afternoon on he Island of the La Grand Jatte” and “La Parade,” the Neo-Impressionism form was started. Through this particular painting style, pointillism, Seurat was able to bring notice to a current theory on optical research. If you have never seen either of the paintings it is clear that they are composed of tiny, minute little dots in close proximity, of one another. Now when viewed closely the pictures are merely multi-colored dots, but when viewed from a distance the dots act as pixels would on a computer and put a picture together.
Though both “Sunday Afternoon…” and “La Parade” are composed in the same way I feel that there is more to “Sunday Afternoon…” then just meets the eye. The painting was manually constructed over the period of two years, in which George pinned every little dot on the canvas. The image is now at the Art Institute of Chicago, where it covers an area of sixty square feet. Now this idea of size brings questions to ones mind. Why make it so big? Other areas in which I found the painting to be highly potential were the color, light, and most of all form. It was said that Seurat took numerous sketches of people standing in the park, to get the figures in his main masterpiece to be just right. Because of this image both the science and art worlds were able to take further strides in the advancement of there own filed of study.



Sources:
http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/paintings-by-georges-seurat1.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunday_Afternoon_on_the_Island_of_La_Grande_Jatte