Georges Seurat (suh RAH) was born in Paris and
studied art at the
Ecole des Beaux Arts when he was eighteen years old. He studied there
for two years and then spent some time in the military.
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He studied Impressionism, but thought he could improve
on the methods
artists of that time were using. He spent his lifetime studying color
and color theory. He devised a method of painting which used dots of
paint instead of using longer brush strokes to create the picture. If
you look at his paintings up closely all you see are dots, but when you
move away from the painting, your eyes form the dots into a picture.
In some of his later works he began to incorporate a few lines and
strokes into his paintings.
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If you were to look at a newspaper with a magnifying
glass you would
only see dots, but when you take away the glass, your eyes make the
dots into a picture. You can visit the Oregon Museum of Science and
Industry to explore this idea of dots which make
pictures. They even mention Seurat and his method in the article.
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His method became known as "pointillism" or
"divisionism". In 1881 he
visited the island of La Grande Jatte( la grahnd zhot) which inspired
many of his future works. The featured work on this page; Sunday
Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, was a very large painting.
Before he started working on it he made more than 200 sketches in
preparation for painting it.
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In his lifetime he completed seven very large
paintings and about
500 smaller ones. He worked to the point of exhaustion. While he was
organizing an exhibit in 1891 he became ill and died. He was only
thirty-one years old.
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He was secretive about his private life. It was not
until after his death that people found out he had a mistress and a
child.
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