Color in Impressionism & Pointillism

For me, color is an excessively important part of my visual world.  I see colors before I see people or things.  I think in colors.  From there, reality intrudes and I can identify what is around me.  Because colors are my primary draw, when I paint, mud has often been the result.  Learning to separate colors and learn how one color works with another in painting has been, and continues to be, a difficult lesson for me.  My emotions want the color, but reality is that all colors do not create better ones.  Thus, “patience, grasshopper”!

According to Wikipedia:

Impressionism is a 19th-century art movement characterized by relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), ordinary subject matter, inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience, and unusual visual angles. Impressionism originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s.

If you know your art history, Impressionism was ground-breaking and revolutionary.  Smooth blending and invisible brush strokes gave way to a different sense of light and its workings on the world seen by the artist.  As with all things, evolution occurred, and from this first rebellion against the “acceptable” art of Europe came other schools.  A direct off-shoot is Pointillism.  Color still is extraordinarily important, but instead of “impressions” being important, the usage of pure color became more distilled.  According to Wikipedia:

Pointillism (/ˈpɔɪntɪlɪzəm/) is a technique of painting in which small, distinct dots of color are applied in patterns to form an image.

Below is a short, clear video about Pointillism, its derivation and its influence.

What does this have to do with me? My need to work with color successfully requires a certain amount of intellectualization and rational thought about color – how color works, how colors interact, how Cobalt Teal reacts with Quinacridone Gold, and so on. I find breaking down colors into individuals before combining them helps. So, I decided to turn to the works of Monet and his studies of the ciffs at Etretat. I looked at several Monet studies, but I will use this one in particular:

And here is my interpretation of it:

Obviously, my colors are more intense, but the impact of light on surfaces was the focus. After a few “Monet studies” I realized that this was not quite was what I was looking for. I knew of Georges Seurat but do not care much for the start graphic quality of his work. Exploring other Pointillists, I remembered Paul Signac, and it is here that I found my current muse.

Signac’s works vary from graphic and sharp to blurred and “painterly” (for want of a better term). His more purely Pointilistic works have an energy and vitality I prefer to Seurat’s – more modern, more attractive, and more elegant in composition. He also works with the precepts of Pointillism, but still in a more Impressionistic way. I did my first Pointillistic painting by painting a detail of this painting by Signac, Cassis, Cap Lombard:

I took a small section, enlarged it, and painted a detail of it without following the exact structure of Signac’s painting.  If you click on Signac’s painting above a couple of times, you can enlarge it, and find the blues and oranges together in the shadows, which I studied and used in my sample below.  Additionally, I studied both warm and cold blues and oranges to get a sense of the temperature of the painting, but I will admit at this point I am rather befuddled and cannot describe my observations

My goal was to look at the usage of color, in particular, the juxtapositioning of colors. In the stones along the shore, and in the reflections in the sea, you find blues and oranges, complements of each other, in play to create light, shadow, reflected light, and reflections seen in the lap of the waves.

Did I succeed? As far as color usage, yes, to a degree. In doing this study I also learned about making a Pointillistic painting. I began with just dots and soon learned it took forever! So, in further studies, I laid in the primary background colors in given areas and then applied the dots. I am working in gouache, and so I can blend colors into each other on the paper to create new ones since artists gouache is never permanently “dry” unless sealed. Gouache is the perfect medium for this, but I can also see the value of acrylics as each layer can dry and then be painted over without dissolving the layer beneath. The other beauty of gouache is that it is an opaque medium and so painting over other colors can be done, unlike watercolors.

More studies will follow using the principles of Pointillism, and I know that I will evolve into my own methods. Copying from the works of a master is a time-honored tradition and an important part of any student’s learning, no matter the field.  Such practice causes one to think, analyze, and apply; it is from this one learns.