Point Taken

One of my favorite classes in school was Art.

Mrs. Boyd took care to have interesting lessons in drawing and color but I think that she had never actually seen any of the paintings she described in person.

One technique was ‘pointilism’. She described it as hundreds of tiny dots of primary and secondary colors dabbed on a canvas to create an image. I thought of it as a dot matrix–pixel –only there weren’t such things as pixels then.

Imagine my surprise when I encountered Seurat and other’s pointilism paintings in person.

The dots are more dabs–irregularly shaped and multi-colored===almost as dipping the paintbrush in one color and then another and putting it on the canvas.

I’m not sure I would have the patience to do that. The results are best viewed from a distance–a challenging task in a museum where everyone walks just a foot away from the paintings.

And none of these paintings were by Seurat.