Art Masterpiece Project Procedure Form Name of Artist: Georges Seurat Name of Print: “An Afternoon at La Grande Jatte” Project: Introduction to Pointillism Objective: Pointillism – Creation of a Painting with only Dots Description: Exlplain the Pointillist technique. Show them the dots in the painting and how lots of dots put together can create the picture. Decide as a group if you want to stick to a theme such as the circus (clowm dancer, lion, elephant) or if you want to let the students create whatever they choose. We have lots of examples to inspire them. They will create their subject by only putting dots of paint next to each other using Q-tips. Prepare palettes for each student with the four different primary colors. Each color has its own Q-tip. Have the kids keep the pictures simple. You may need to gently guide some of the children to resist smearing and over doing this project. Encourage them not to draw or paint with the Q-tips but to add more and more dots. Suggestions: Try to avoid mixing colors, do not dip the yellow Q-tip into the red paint, to make orange but instead put a red dot very close to the yellow dot. Supplies: White Drawing Paper (9x12) Q-Tips Tempera or Acrylic Paint (Red, Yellow, Blue & Green) Paper plates for palettes (small) Paper Towels Property Of: ANNA MARIE JACOBSON ELEMENTARY ART MASTERPIECE PROGRAM Georges Seurat (Zhorzh Soo-Rah) Seurat was born in 1859 in Paris. He was the son of a comfortably situated middle class family. This entitled him to pursue his career as much as he wanted because he was never required to work or earn a living. He attended school in Paris until he was seventeen and then studied sculpture before being admitted to a school of art. His training was extremely academic and included a great deal of copying some of the work of the great masters at the Louvre. Seurat read widely during his days of training and became interested in scientific theories on the uses and effects of color and light. He began by exploring aspects of light in black and white drawings in 1880 and worked on the theory for 2 years. Seurat was as much a scientist as an artist. He was interested in trying to establish a rational system for achieving the kind of vibrant color effects that the Impressionists had arrived at instinctively. The ‘Impressionists’ were a group of artists whose main intention was to show changes in light, color or action in the scenes they painted, capturing the feeling of a single brief moment, while Seuart wanted to make the moment into something lasting. The method he came up with was to place small touches of unmixed color side by side on the canvas. This meant that the eye mixed the colors as the painting was observed. Seurat began to paint using this method. A critic coined the term “pointillism” in reference to describe the technique of using a myriad of tiny dots of color. Seurat’s spots of color might be squares, triangles, circles, dots or tiny lines. Seurat’s spots of color might be squares, triangles, circles, dots or tiny lines. Seurat preferred the word, “divisionism”. Seurat next turned his attention to the significance of line in painting. He felt that certain directions of lines could express specific emotions: horizontal lines represented Property Of: ANNA MARIE JACOBSON ELEMENTARY ART MASTERPIECE PROGRAM calmness, for example while upward and downward, sloping lines represented happiness and sadness respectively. Seurat's theories can be summarized as follows: The emotion of gaiety can be achieved by the domination of luminous hues, by the predominance of warm colors, and by the use of lines directed upward. Calm is achieved through an equivalence/balance of the use of the light and the dark, by the balance of warm and cold colors, and by lines that are horizontal. Sadness is achieved by using dark and cold colors and by lines pointing downwards Seurat died very suddenly at the age of 31, in the year 1891, apparently from meningitis. He left behind over four hundred drawings, six completed sketchbooks and about sixty canvases, five of them very large. He was survived by a wife and a year old son. Seurat’s work was very influential. However, his followers never achieved the skill Seurat had. He planned his pictures with extraordinary care, and some of his paintings took years to finish. Property Of: ANNA MARIE JACOBSON ELEMENTARY ART MASTERPIECE PROGRAM .