Georges Seurat (pronounced Suh Rah) - 1859 - 1891 - Post-Impressionist

Georges Seurat is a Post Impressionist (blurry painting) painter but instead of using brushstrokes for a blurry view he did pointillism, a technique where solids come together by applying small, close-packed dots of color to a white background. Many artists imitated Seurat’s method, today we are going to do so as well and create shading with dots using light colors to show light and dark colors to show shading.

In the summer of 1884, Seurat created a MAJOR canvas, showing a popular boating place on the island of La Grande Jatte. Every day for months he traveled to his chosen spot, where he would work all morning making dots on this big canvas. Each afternoon, he continued painting the giant canvas in his studio. After 2 years of concentrated, systematic work, Seurat completed the painting in 1886, and exhibited it with the Impressionist group in May of that year. La Grande Jatte proved to be the main talking point of the exhibition, and he was hailed by the critics as offering the most significant way forward from Impressionism. The key here is that this type of painting is different and it also takes MUCH more time to complete (ie 2 years for a very large canvas). We will use small paper canvases for this reason (instead of a very large piece of paper).