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Georges Seurat
Georges Seurat (December 2, 1859 - March 29, 1891) was a
French oil painting artist and the founder of
Neoimpressionism. His large work Sunday Afternoon on the Island of
La Grande Jatte is one of the icons of 19th century painting.
Seurat took to heart the color theorists' notion of a scientific
approach to painting. Seurat believed that a painter could use
color to create harmony and emotion in art in the same way that a
musician uses variation in sound and tempo to create harmony in
music. Seurat theorized that the scientific application of color
was like any other natural law, and he was driven to prove this
conjecture. He thought that the knowledge of perception and optical
laws could be used to create a new language of art based on its own
set of heuristics and he set out to show this language using lines,
color intensity and color schema. Seurat called this language
Chromoluminarism.
Seurat's theories can be summarized as follows: The emotion of
gaiety can be achieved by the domination of luminous hues, by the
predominance of warm colors, and by the use of lines directed
upward. Calm is achieved through an equivalence/balance of the use
of the light and the dark, by the balance of warm and cold colors,
and by lines that are horizontal. Sadness is achieved by using dark
and cold colors and by lines pointing downwards.
Seurat'scrowning achievement - "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of
La Grande Jatte" shows people of all different classes in a park.
The tiny juxtaposed dots of multi- colored paint allow the eye of
the viewer to blend colors optically, rather than having the colors
blended on the canvas or pre-blended as a material pigment. It took
Seurat two years to complete this ten foot wide painting, and he
spent much time in the park sketching to prepare for the work
(there are about 60 studies). It is now exhibited in the permanent
collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.
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