Art Historical Background Drawing

Artist Statement

For this project, we were asked to research an interesting artist or art movement of our choice and create a slideshow. For my presentation, I researched Georges Seurat and his Neo-Impressionist technique known as ‘Divisionism,’ or simply ‘Pointillism.’ I had originally decided on Seurat because I had remembered seeing a few of his paintings in person at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC a few years ago, and I particularly liked his style and color choices. In my artwork, I took inspiration from his most famous piece, 'Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte' because it included many of the colors, the blues and greens that were found in the original colored version of my gridded self portrait photo.

In the second part of this art history project, we were asked to practice using the style of our artists or movement and eventually apply it to the backgrounds of our old gridded self portraits. In my rough draft, I used an assortment of different colored pastel pencils and experimented with the dotting technique on a 12x18 sheet of paper. Finally, using my thumbnail, I decided on the colors, the greens and touches of yellow that were found in Seurat's painting, and added them using small dots in the background of my final piece. Seraut also tended to rim his work with a darker border, so I went in with dark/light blue pencils and did the same.

Overall, I do like how this came out. Just like Seurat, from afar you can barely tell that they are individual dots. There was not a lot of space left over to work in however, so if I were to redo this I would have probably chosen a different portrait. Also, I would use some sort of paint like Seurat and I apply dots of different colors that would visually blend together to form a new color when viewed from a distance.