Music like Cold Colors

Instead of painting outlines and shapes with brush strokes and areas of colour, pointillism builds up the image from separate coloured dots of paint. From a distance, the dots merge and appear to be areas of shaded tones, but the colours have an extra vibrancy from the juxtaposition of contrasting dots.Georges Seurat first studied art with Justin Lequien, a sculptor. Seurat attended the École des Beaux-Arts in 1878 and 1879. After a year of service at Brest Military Academy, he returned to Paris in 1880. He shared a small studio on the Left Bank with two student friends before moving to a studio of his own. For the next two years, he worked at mastering the art of black-and-white drawing. He spent 1883 on his first major painting—a huge canvas titled Bathers at Asnières. After his painting was rejected by the Paris Salon, Seurat turned away from such establishments, instead allying with the independent artists of Paris. In 1884, he and other artists (including Maximilien Luce) formed the Société des Artistes Indépendants. There he met and befriended fellow artist Paul Signac. Seurat shared his new ideas about pointillism with Signac, who subsequently painted in the same idiom. In the summer of 1884, Seurat began work on his masterpiece, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, which took him two years to compDuring the 19th century, scientist-writers such as Michel Eugène Chevreul, Ogden Rood and David Sutter wrote treatises on color, optical effects and perception. They adapted the scientific research of Helmholtz and Newton into a written form that was understandable by laypeople. Artists followed new discoveries in perception with great interest. Chevreul was perhaps the most important influence on artists at the time; his great contribution was producing a color wheel of primary and intermediary huesleteChevreul was a French chemist who restored old tapestries. During his restorations of tapestries, he noticed that the only way to restore a section properly was to take into account the influence of the colors around the missing wool; he could not produce the right hue unless he recognized the surrounding dyes. Chevreul discovered that two colors juxtaposed, slightly overlapping or very close together, would have the effect of another color when seen from a distance. The discovery of this phenomenon became the basis for the pointillist technique of the Neoimpressionist painters. Chevreul also realized that the 'halo' that one sees after looking at a color is the opposing, or complementary, color. For example: After looking at a red object, one may see a cyan echo/halo of the original object.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 counterpoint and variation 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.