Originally posted 2008-06-19 06:12:47. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
Also on the DVD I talked about yesterday, the third episode was about Georges Seraut’s Sunday at La Grand Jette. You might know it as “Sunday in the Park.”
The cool thing about Seraut is that his technique consisted of painting with tiny brush strokes, mostly dots and dashes in a technique called pointillism. As you move closer to the painting, the images dissolve into a mass of dots. If you start close and move away, suddenly the picture pops into view. This is the very first painting to use the technique.
While this was revolutionary at the time, today we see things reproduced as distinct bits of color all the time. We call them pixels.
This has some interesting resonances with needlepoint. His ideas about color came from the researches on color in tapestries and he used distinct blobs of pure color and let the eye mix the blobs together into the blended shades. Sounds kind of like needlepoint, doesn’t it?
We call that optical color mixing and do it all the time in our stitching.
But the whole idea of a chaos of color resolving into a picture is also something we should remember. We look at our needlepoint from stitching distance, and we see the points. But we should step back and look at it from viewing distance. This way we can easily see the effect our needlepoint will have on others.
By the way if you’re ever in Chicago go to the Art Insititute to see it both up close and from across the room.
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