Seurat

Seurat seems almost neurotic in the development of his methods. His technique looks as though it would require extreme patience for such tedious work. It's this anal-retentive attention to detail that I admire in artists. The ideas of pointillism, conveying images with only simple shapes, breaking objects down to their simplest components, are extremely common now. Printed photos can be composed of dots, each only cyan, magenta, yellow or black. Any digital image is entirely colored pixels. Photo realistic images can be created by burning and scraping pieces of toast, or by stacking Rubik's cubes. Seurat's method, however, was the precursor to all these forms of displaying images. By eliminating lines from his work, previously the most indispensable element of artwork, Seurat began a style "utterly without precedent"(274). This revolutionary style is what draws me to Seurat's work, though Schapiro writes that "Admirers of Seurat often regret his method"(101). Instead, I find myself regretting his subject matter. Perhaps due to my lack of knowledge on the sociopolitical context of Seurat's society, the implications of the paintings, the alienation of modern class society, would have been lost on me. I would not have interpreted any emotions from his stiff, geometric figures. Anyway, I'm more interested in his systematic approach to painting. I'd rather read more about his rules of proportion and color. I want to know more about M. Rood and his equations which demonstrate that "the luminosity of optical mixtures is always superior to that of material mixtures"(278).