🎨 Schools of Art: Pointillism 🔴 — A World Made of Dots 🔵🟡
🔴 A follow-up story that connects the Line and Shape and Colour chapters in the Art Album. 🎨✨ It begins with the familiar Art Families—straight line, curved line, angle, circle and especially the tiny dot—and invites children to discover just how powerful that little dot can become. 🔵🟡 Building on their explorations of primary and secondary colours, colour mixing, and complementary colours that seem to strengthen and almost “vibrate” beside one another, the story introduces the fascinating experiments of different artists. 👀 Instead of always mixing colours together on the palette, artists placed tiny touches of colour side by side and allowed the viewer’s eye to help bring them together from a distance—a technique that became known as Pointillism, from the French point, meaning “dot.” 🔴🔵🟡 Children move between close-up details and complete paintings, discovering that a picture can seem to change depending on how we look at it, before experimenting themselves with cotton buds and dots of unmixed colour. 🖌️✨ This story opens a doorway into series of stories introducing different Schools of Art, exploring colour theories and further artistic explorations, sparking wonder: “What happens when complementary colours sit beside one another? What other artists painted with dots—and what new ways of using colour came next?” 🌈💭
ART STORIES
9/29/20264 min read
People have always made art. Wherever human beings have lived, they have found ways to draw, paint, carve, decorate and make beautiful things. We make art because we have ideas and feelings we want to express. We can draw something we have really seen, or something that exists only in our imagination. 🎨✨
You have seen our Art Families chart before. Artists can make an astonishing number of things from some very simple families: the straight line, curved line, angle or broken line, circle, and the dot. 🔴 A dot does not even have to be perfectly round. It might be oval, squashed or even a little kidney-shaped. It seems such a tiny, simple thing…but imagine thousands and thousands of dots of different colours all sitting beside one another and creating an entire painting.
Look at this very closely. 🔎 What colours can you find? Yellow, orange, blue, green and red are all sitting beside one another. 🔴🟡🟢🔵 At the moment, they just look like little touches of colour. Perhaps they do not seem to be making something that you can recognise at all. But could these tiny marks actually be part of something much bigger?
Some artists in France became fascinated by exactly this idea. One of them was Georges Seurat. He wondered what would happen if colours were not always completely mixed together on the palette. Instead, he could put little touches of colour beside one another and let our eyes help bring them together from a distance. It is almost as though Seurat were saying, “I don’t have to do all the mixing with my brush. The viewer’s eyes can help the colours come together!”👀🎨
But is that really possible?
This painting is called "Circus Sideshow." 🎪 We have actually looked at a tiny part of it before, only we were so close that we could hardly tell what we were looking at. Can you recognise which part it was? Show the close-up again, then return to the whole painting.
Can you find it? 👀 Look carefully at the faces and the colours around them. When we were very close, all we could see were little touches of yellow, orange, blue, green and red sitting beside one another. 🔴🟡🟢🔵 Those dots have not moved, they have not melted together. Our view has changed, we moved farther away, and suddenly our eyes began to see a person, light, shade and shadow instead of separate little points.
And you know what sometimes happens when we see someone experimenting with a new idea? We start wondering, “Could I try that too?” That is exactly what happened. Seurat was not the only artist fascinated by this way of painting with tiny dots of colour. Another French artist named Paul Signac saw what Seurat was exploring and became excited to experiment with the idea himself. 🔵
Look at his painting named "Femmes au puits" which translates from French as "Women at the Well" What colours do you notice? What do you think all these little dots could become if we moved farther away? 👀✨ When we look at the whole painting those little patches have become two women beside a well, standing in a bright landscape with grass, trees, shadows, sunlight and the distant coast. Nothing on the painting changed when we stepped back. The colours stayed exactly where they were, but our eyes began bringing all those separate touches together into shapes and a whole scene full of shades.
These artists, Seurat and Signac, were fascinated by dividing colours into separate touches instead of mixing everything together first. And experimented if hundreds and thousands of dots could work together to create different colours, shades, shapes, and whole landscapes. 🔴🔵🟡🌳
And people eventually gave this curious way of painting a name. One critic described it as ‘painting by dots.’ The technique became known as Pointillism. Let’s clap it: 👏Point-il-lism. 👏 A word that comes from the French point, meaning a dot.
So we have discovered one fascinating School of Art that uses one of the elements from our Art Families chart — the dot family. 🔴 And Seurat certainly needed patience when he created one of the most famous Pointillist paintings, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. 😄 He definitely did not paint this one in an afternoon! Seurat worked on the painting and its many studies for about two years. The finished canvas is enormous , as tall as a doorway and almost as long as a small car! 🚪🚗 Just imagine covering something that big with countless tiny touches of colour, dot after dot after dot, day after day after day. 🔴
And look at all the details, the elegant hats and umbrellas, the trees, grass, water, boats, and even a little dog. 🐕☂️⛵ Seurat had visited La Grande Jatte, an island in the River Seine where people came to relax, and he carefully built this huge scene from all his observations. From far away it feels like one peaceful Sunday afternoon, but now we know its secret: hundreds and thousands of tiny touches of colour. 👀✨
Now I have prepared cotton buds, brushes and acrylic paint for you, along with a little scene you can paint. First, sketch the main shapes very lightly. Then choose one colour at a time and make dots across the areas where you want that colour to appear. 🔴 When you are ready, change to another colour and add its dots beside the first ones. 🔵🟡When you are finished, step back and admire your Pointillist masterpiece. 👀✨
Or you can forget the prepared scene and create something that exists only in your imagination.
I wonder… what other artists experimented with Pointillism? Did they all make tiny round dots, or did some use larger marks and different shapes? And what Art movement came after Pointillism? Some artists soon began using colour even more wildly, green faces, red trees and pink skies. 🌈 …but that is a story for another School of Art which I will tell you another day...
With Montessori joy,
Vanina 😊
