How is it possible to draw without lines? This may be a simple question to answer today because we have already seen it being done by others, but in the 19th century; no one would have thought of such a possibility. Yet, someone did. His name is Georges Seurat. Seurat was an artist trained in the French academic tradition that emphasized the importance of lines in drawing. Yet Seurat refused to be confined within the limits of his training. He thought outside the lines and the result was a breakthrough new style which came to be known as pointillism.
Pointillism can be defined as “a technique whereby both color and contour are created through the methodical application of tiny dots of color” (Skrapits, 1992). In doing this, some may label
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Examining this work shows the ambition that Seurat had. He employs the technique of pointillism in this work, but one can see that it was much more refined by the time he created A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. Seurat made thirteen preparatory works towards this work. To Seurat, the impressionist sense of spontaneity was second to the academic approach. He didn’t just paint en plain air as most impressionists did. He made sketches en plain air, but they were to serve as study; not a final product. He made several sketches outside as he observed his subjects and the landscape, but then took everything back to the studio where he applied his studies to create his completed works. This sense of going against the norm seems to be at the base of Seurat’s working process. He followed academic process but not entirely, he was an impressionist painter, but did not adhere to all impressionists methods. His works lead to a new kind of genre termed …show more content…
He made landscape drawings of trees, women and even animals on La Grande Jatte scenery using this format in order to properly study their forms and shadows. Such conté crayon drawings studies include Seated Woman with a Parasol (1884/85), Woman Walking with a Parasol (1884), Landscape with dog (1884) and several drawings of trees. Once he was comfortable with his conté crayon drawings, he started applying color to his studies. One of his study paintings, The Island of La Grande Jatte (1884) shows just the landscape without any people or animals on it. In this study, Seurat studies how the light and shadow areas on the landscape will look like. It’s as if he is figuring out from which angle to paint his masterpiece. He experimented with pointillism even in these early stages to figure out how the grass, the water on the river and the shadows cast by the trees will look like. Once he was comfortable with how it looked, Seurat started adding subjects to the landscape. He made several studies using color with various amounts of people and animals on the landscape, before painting his final masterpiece with all the figures included. These color studies include Woman with a Monkey (1884), Seated and Standing Women (1884), Rose-Colored Skirt (1884), Soldier (Cadet from Saint-Cyr)(1884) and Sketch with Many Figures (1884).
This painting can be divided into multiple separate paintings
Carol Armstrong begins her essay by pointing out the two main points that come about when discussing A Bar at the Folies-Bergere. These two points are the social context of the painting and its representation of 19th century Paris, and the internal structure of the painting itself with the use of space. She then goes on and addresses what she will be analyzing throughout her essay. She focuses on three main points, the still life of the counter and its commodities, the mirror and its “paintedness”, and the barmaid and her “infra-thin hinge” between the countertop and the mirror.
The work depicts a family in plain clothing enclosed in a simple solitary room with a fading fire amidst the dark shadows of the background and another light source that extends from beyond the scope of the canvas. At first glance the influences of Caravaggio and Rembrandt are apparent. Their faces are neither, sad, sullen, angry, or joyful, but rather their emotional expression is plain and uncomplicated, adding a sense of timelessness to the painting. As in the description (20-34) of the piece which states; “It reflects 17th Century social theory, which celebrated the natural virtue of those that worked the soil”, (p. 609). The idea of portraying a classic simple lifestyle is a refreshing one and a concept which will reoccur in other works of the Baroque period.
Georges Seurat was born in Paris, France on December 2, 1859. He lived with his mother, Ernestine Faivre, and his two older siblings. His interest in art started in his early childhood and he eventually was encouraged by his uncle, an amateur painter and textile dealer, who gave him his first art lessons. Then in 1875, Seurat entered an art school where he started receiving professional lessons from sculptor Justin Lequiene. About three years later, he entered Ecole des Beaux Arts School and began sketching from plaster casts and live models. On his free time he would visit libraries and art museums in Paris and seek instruction from other well known artists. Michel-Eugene Chevreul was one of the artists who introduced Seurat to color theory. “Chevreul's discovery that by juxtaposing complementary colors one could produce the impression of another color became one of the bases for Seurat's Divisionist technique” (Remer). Seurat served in the Brest military for one year then returned to Paris and immediately continued with art. His first major painting was Bathers at Asnieres which was rejected by the jury ...
The Interpretation/Meaning (III) will be written without any guideline points, the aim of this part will be to determine what the painter wanted to express with his piece of work and what it tells us in a symbolic or not instantly clear way. This part will also handle why the artist drew the painting the way he did it and why he chose various techniques or tools.
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.
There is, however, a slight opposition to this intense realism. It can be seen in Wood’s representation of foliage. The trees that appear in the upper left corner look like large green lollipops peeking over the roof of the house. The viewer knows that trees do not naturally look like that. Wood has depicted them as stylized and modern, similar to the trees seen is Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the island of La Grand Jatte. After viewing other works by Wood, it is clear that he has adopted this representation for the trees in many of his paintings.
Georges Seurat was a French born artist born on December 2nd 1859 in Paris, Frrance. He study at École des Beaux-Art, which was one of the most prestige art schools in the world, which is also known for training many of the renounced artist we know. George Seurat left the École des Beaux-Art and began to work on his own; he began to visit impressionist exhibitions, where he gained inspiration from the impressionist painters, such as Claude Monet. Seurat also was interested in the science of art; he explored perception, color theory and the psychological effect of line and form. Seurat experimented with all the ideas he had gained, he felt the need to go beyond the impressionist style, he started to focus on the permanence of paintin...
We can see a clear representation of the impressionist that tended to completely avoid historical or allegorical subjects. In this painting, Monet’s painted very rapidly and used bold brushwork in order to capture the light and the color; include relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes. An insistence on what Monet called “a spontaneous work rather than a calculated one” – this in particular accounts for the sketchy and seemingly unfinished quality of the Impressionist paintings. In the texture, he played with the shadow and light and created variation in tone, he employs patches of depth and surface. The light in the painting come from back to the windmill, it is a light shines softly behind the houses and the windmill. He was shown each brushstroke in the painting. Balance is achieved through an asymmetrical placement of the houses and the most important the
It appears to me that pictures have been over-valued; held up by a blind admiration as ideal things, and almost as standards by which nature is to be judged rather than the reverse; and this false estimate has been sanctioned by the extravagant epithets that have been applied to painters, and "the divine," "the inspired," and so forth. Yet in reality, what are the most sublime productions of the pencil but selections of some of the forms of nature, and copies of a few of her evanescent effects, and this is the result, not of inspiration, but of long and patient study, under the instruction of much good sense…
...ere was a very particular exposition of some of his work, called Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks. It consisted in pages of regular notebooks, but with observations, sketches, ideas and poetry fragments, either from popular culture or from world history and races. These pieces were very unique and the sketches had a special touch that I had never seen before in any other artwork. Basquiat’s work was very simple, but with strong ideas and a clear message. That was the beauty of his work.
Monet chose to depict exquisite landscapes from his own gardens and elsewhere, particularly in France. He uses small, elegant brush strokes and vibrant colour to match the scenes he paints. In the mid-1870’s, Monet’s influence over Degas lead Degas to lean his colour choices nearer to those of other Impressionists. In addition to this, Degas began employing pastels, which gave his works a more granular affect that more closely resembled those of other Impressionists. For numerous years in his life, after attempting to paint his the first of his famous “Haystacks” ,and, being unable to seize the right shading or colours due to the rising sun, Monet was intrigued by the affect of weather and light on his outdoor projects. On the other hand, Degas, although also concentrated mainly in France, based his works on people, nudes and ballerinas in particular. Monet never painted a nude.
This painting by Vincent Van Gogh is on display at the Art Institute of Chicago Museum, in the Impressionism exhibit. There are many things going on in this painting that catch the viewer’s eye. The first is the piece’s vibrant colors, light blues and browns, bright greens, and more. The brush strokes that are very visible and can easily be identified as very thick some might even say bold. The furniture, the objects, and the setting are easy to identify and are proportioned to each other. There is so much to see in this piece to attempt to explain in only a few simple sentences.
His approach was an organized, discipline, and theoretical painting base of knowing stories, and the style was line rather than color. The reason I picked the painting is because it does capture my attention of how messed up it is that these men would capture women and rape them. But in today society you see in the news every day in America they’re capture of women getting kidnap, rape and it captures my mind of how messed up this is. Nicolas is showing us these events that happen and you see this stuff in movies. The painting sends a message a powerful message by the emotion, color and theoretical. This painting is so historic they made a movie based on the painting in 1962 and 2006. Next is regarded as France finest artist is a women named Louise Mollin (1610-1696). Her painting “Still Life with Cherries, Strawberries, and Gooseberries” a famous painting that created a perfect balanced, simple composition and focusing the attention on the objects. The sizes, shapes and texture of the fruit and container form international contrasts. Her painting turns out to be simple but yet elegant and change the way of art. The colors of the fruit and bold and focuses just on the fruit other than having a painting doing something with war, death, and story behind it. This has change art and you can see in today painting something simple can grasp anyone
Starting with visual elements I saw lines, implied depth, and texture. I see lines by him using lines created by an edge. Each line is curved not straight but it works with the piece. By using this he creates the piece to make it whole. He uses many curved lines within the painting I don’t know if there is a straight line in the whole thing. The next element I saw was implied depth. Using linear perspective you can see the mountains but they look smaller than the rest of the piece. They are the vanishing point in the back making it look as if you can walk down and they will get closer and closer to you. The last element that I saw was texture. They talk about Van Gogh’s painting, The Starry Night having texture through a two- dimensional surface, in which this painting has that similar feel. Van Gogh uses thick brush stokes on his paintings to show his feelings. There is actually a name for this called, Impasto,
George-Pierre Seurat was born in France in 1859. Seurat began his career by studying at the “Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris under artist Henri Lehmann” ("Georges Seurat," n.d.), before adventuring out on his own. George Seurat was for the most part self-taught, only attending Ecole des Beaux-Arts for one year. He often visited museums, read about new techniques and studied the works of others. Seurat admired the works of Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro these artists and their techniques, particularly their use