Famous Artists Fun: Seurat

Next up in our study of famous artists was George Seurat.  I loved going to the Orsay in Paris as a child where I got to see his beautiful Pointilism paintings!  The basics of a Pointilism painting is a whole bunch of dots that up close doesn’t look like much, but when you look back at the whole work your eye blends the dots together to see a picture. Cool, huh?! Seurat saw the Science in it and was trying to maximize light and feeling in his pictures. It took him 2 years to paint the picture with all the umbrellas below!

I bet you would recognize some if you saw them:

 

Crayon Pointilism Paintings

We love melting crayons at our house!! So I came up with this project to help Goofy better visualize a Pointilism painting since we don’t live in Paris where we could see it first hand =-) We chopped up crayons (already small nubs).



We placed them on a small canvas, spaced out, to make Goofy’s pictures of a castle. (He placed them & picked the colors) This is (kinda) what a pointilism painting looks like up close – lots of dots and you can’t tell what the picture looks like yet.



Then we put his artwork on a cookie sheet in a preheated 250 F oven for 20 seconds & TADA! Can you see the castle, blue rounded door, yellow flags, and nighttime sky now? Goofy was amazed at how his picture blended & came to life – just like Seurat’s (sorta) pictures when you stand back to appreciate the beauty of the entire piece.

I think one of the reasons I love Pointilism so much is it reminds me of our lives. When we look up close at our day-to-day lives sometimes it is hard to understand why things happy or what God has in mind. But when we can step back (as truly only God can do) and see the big picture it all comes together to make a beautiful picture.

Looking for a couple good books to learn about George Seurat? These are our favorites: