by Jon Parker

Created on: December 15, 2006   Last Updated: May 08, 2007

Seurat The Eiffel Tower
The subject is the Eiffel Tower in Paris with the edge of a tree on the left. Below the tower is an impression of a bridge.

I found this quite difficult to do as I prefer using larger brush marks. I used acrylic paint and a very thin brush, often using the back end of the brush for the dots. This technique is called pointillism. Seurat often spent years working on his pieces of art, but I completed this study in under five hours.

By working into this piece, I managed to create an impression of form and tone. I experimented with two processes of achieving lighter hues with the colour white. For the background sky, I coated a thick layer of dots on my cartridge paper and went over it with white dots. For the tree, however, I used the technique of applying dots and brushmarks to the paper but left white showing through. Both work well but had I used the technique of letting white show through the Eiffel Tower would probably have not stood out so well.

This image makes me feel intrigued because the process of pointillism is fascinating. It is more of a science then an art, in many ways. This particular painting makes me feel like I am looking at an impressive structure when actually this is merely an impression of dots. The optical colour blending is very clever as it tricks the eye into thinking there is one image when in fact there are many coloured dots blending to create different tones.

Comparisons
On the next page is analysis and a study of a Van Gogh painting.
Van Gogh and Seurat were both post-impressionist artists. They were both inspired by Monet and Renoir and each studied natural forms. Both made developments to the traditional impressionist style, but each went slightly different ways about it.

Seurat took a scientific precise approach, using optical colour mixing, with his hues blending on the canvas itself. Van Gogh, however, used more expressive brush marks with lots of different colours. There is a lot of directional movement within his paintings.

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