Not every color that’s on your painting must be there in real life.
 |
A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, 1884, Georges Seurat, courtesy
Art Institute of Chicago |
Pointillism
and its twin, Divisionism*
developed as painters sought to advance and understand the optical revolution that
was Impressionism. Their flagship painting—and the root of the concept—is Georges Seurat's
masterpiece, A Sunday Afternoon
on the Island of La Grande Jatte. Seurat called his painting style ‘chromoluminarism,’
which hints at what he was striving for—a way to enhance the ability of canvas
and paint to reflect light.
For the record, Seurat didn’t paint La Grande Jatte
in one sweep. It would have been close to impossible to hold that many ideas
simultaneously. In the first pass, he used conventionally-mixed pigments including
earths. In the second, he dispensed with the earths and limited the number of
paints on his palette. It wasn’t until his last sweep that he introduced the
dots of color that we see today. Remember that next time you want to toss a
canvas that isn’t working.
 |
The Pine Tree at Saint Tropez, 1909, Paul
Signac, courtesy Pushkin Museum |
Seurat believed that he could get more vibrant and pure colors by letting the viewer’s eye do the mixing, instead of mixing colors on the palette. In truth, what he was striving for—an additive color scheme—is impossible with paint; it remains subtractive because it's reflecting light. What Seurat really wanted was digital painting, and it wouldn’t be invented for another 100 years.
Nevertheless, he did create an exciting new way of putting
down paint. Placing contrasting colors next to each other causes an optical excitation that
typical color mixing cannot achieve. In some way, every color in a Seurat painting
manages to maintain its individuality while contributing to a larger whole.
 |
Le séchage des voiles (The Drying Sails), 1905, André
Derain, courtesy Pushkin Museum |
To create these effects, the divisionist painter first identified the local color of objects. Then, he interspersed dots of yellow-orange in the sunlit passages, and blues, reds and purples in the shadows. Pointillists worked a little differently, thinking through the entire painting in raw color, much like modern printing creates an image in CMYK.
The impact of adjacent colors on perception is a well-known
and -researched phenomenon, one that touches on the area of optical
illusion. These optical sleights-of-hand are known as contrast effects. By
putting dots of contrasting colors next to each other, pointillists hoped to recreate
these contrast effects in their paintings.
Were the pointillists and divisionists able to make colors
seem brighter than their peers who were still mixing and painting the conventional way? Perhaps
slightly, because they avoided the muddiness that can happen in paint-mixing.
However, that was a battle that had largely already been won by their Impressionist
peers.
 |
Portrait of Irma Sèthe, 1894, Théo van Rysselberghe, courtesy
Musée du Petit Palais |
Nor were they able to entirely express shadow and light with hue; these still need some value shifts to make them intelligible.
Nevertheless, their optical experiments influenced a century
of painting, ending in the experiments of op art in the 1960s. We don’t have to want to paint like them to learn from them.
The takeaway lesson of the pointillists is that not every color
that’s on your painting must be there in real life. Your job as an artist is to
represent the inner reality of a situation, not its photographic shell. If the
trees are moving, perhaps a flash of orange will add a sense of motion. The sky may be
blue, or it may be yellow; it’s hard to say.
The human eye craves interest, and as long as you have the
value right, you can play fast and loose with the actual hue.
*What most of us call Pointillism is actually Divisionism
but there’s really little point (ahem) in dividing them, at least for our
purposes.
