A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte: Georges Seurat (1884)

A Sunday Afternoon, for short, is perhaps one of my most favorite paintings of all time. I think the majority of us have witnessed this painting whether we know it or not.

By the way, Brian incorrectly calls the museum by the wrong name. it is not Chicago Museum of Art, it is actually Art Institute of Chicago. The video was to show whether we were teenagers of the 80's or teens of the millennium, we've seen this painting before from the media. 

Aside from seen the painting, have we really actually "seen" the painting? I don't mean going to Chicago and standing in front of it in person, but looking at it from an artists point of view.

With a technique known as Pointillism, Seurat created a large scale painting of everyday socializing. The painting is consisted of millions if not billions of tiny little dots of paint all blended upon each other to create an image. Usually when artist paints they move is strokes across the canvas or plaster, but here, Seurat literally grabbed a paintbrush, dabbed it in paint, and pinned it on the canvas. Pointillism is a very, very tedious and straining process. I can't describe it any other way. One way to think of Pointillism is to closely examine a photo. When we look at a photo we see the image as a whole, but the closer we get, the pixels begin to expose themselves as colors upon colors. With that, we have pointillism (as seen in the above video). 

The image itself is a still life portrait of people at a recreation park, but the stillness is then suddenly disrupted by two figures who actually seem to be in action. In the foreground, a small dog running toward a larger dog creates the first action, and in the foreground to the right is a little girl dancing and twirling. The people in the painting are either facing the left or to the right, but we don't actually see a full frontal view, except with the two central figures, a young girl is a white dress and a woman with an orange umbrella, who are actually the vanishing point of the image. They seem to break the mold of the entire scene. It is a painting that expresses the simple pleasures in life and the little things that we tend to over-look. I think most of us have forgotten what it is like to just go outside and enjoy life without television or any other distraction.