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Pointillism

Pointillism is a style of painting in which small distinct points of primary 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 word Pointillism is actually the incorrect term used more popularly today than its actual name of Neo-Impressionism. 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 connotation.

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 additive 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. Pointillism also refers to a style of 20th-century music composition, used by composers like Anton Webern.

Retrieved from From Wikipedia

Detail from Seurat's La Parade (1889), showing the contrasting dots of paint used in pointillism.

Thumbnail image of " Goose Lake " and detail

The explanations above are for purists of traditional pointillism. George Seurat was first, a scientist who explored color and it’s effects on our vision and became an artist through his scientific studies. Unlike Mr. Seurat, my work doesn’t adhere to tradition with the use of dots of primary colors only. I generally mix my inks in the pens that I use while I’m drawing and the dot density is much, much heavier or closer together than what a traditional pointillism work would be. I go for feeling or color blends that I like instead of tradition. The traditional method of drawing or painting in points would be an incredible amount of work, a vast learning curve if you will, and it’s more time and energy than I have thus far been willing to invest. ( That last statement is a bit of an oxymoron I’m thinking. There is an incredible amount of time and effort put into each of my drawings. Lot’s of work ! )

LD

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