Introduction - An Introduction to Computer Graphics for Artists - page 5

Fig. 1.4 Georges Seurat, Bridge of Courbevoie 1886/1887 (Image is copyright free, in the public
domain)

1.3 The Infl uence of Pointillism

Pointillism is the name given to a style of painting invented in the late nineteenth
century by the French artist Georges Seurat. Seurat's work could be described as
inspired by the work of Impressionists like Claude Monet or Pierre Auguste Renoir,
who discovered that they could make a convincing landscape without mixing their
colors in a traditional way. Instead of fully mixing every color to match colors
observed in a landscape, Monet, Renoir, and others used bright colors that were
either unmixed or were not fully mixed, then placed them near other colors that
would make them seem as if they were part of the same color. This technique is
called optical mixing because the paint itself isn't mixed, but the colors appear as if
they had been mixed if a viewer was a suffi cient distance from the painting (Fig. 1.4 ).
Critics later showed this concept to be mistaken. As an example, putting yellow and
blue beside each other produces gray, not green, as the Impressionist theory sug-
gested (Lee 1981 ; Gage 1987 ). Despite this error, the work of Georges Seurat and
other artists who followed became the basis for pixel-based representations of visual
information (Hayes 1999 ).