The Easel

17th May 2022

The vibrating beingness of Seurat’s pointillist paintings

Summer Brennan | Psyche | 10th May 2022

Seurat thought colourful Impressionism needed the discipline of the Old Masters. His remedy was pointillism – painting with meticulously applied dots of “simultaneously contrasting” colours. This technique “aims to deconstruct the act of seeing … Something about Seurat’s work just pulls you in. The mind wants patterns in the same way that the eye wants colours to merge. We want definition and borders. But sometimes, no matter how hard we try to keep it together, we cannot.”

Why it took us thousands of years to see the colour violet

Allen Tager | Psyche | 23rd June 2021

The colour violet, it seems, carries a mystery. An analysis of 14 large art museums reveals that, before the 1860’s, less than 4% of paintings used violet. For the rest of the 19th century, it appears in 37% of paintings and, in twentieth century paintings, 43%. The explanation offered is, in part, that violet rarely appears in nature.  The Impressionists, looking for colours to contrast with the yellow sunshine they loved to paint, discovered that violet worked well. “Violettomania” howled the critics.

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