Mural Dilemma, Volume 1: What's the Point?

Well, pointillism, that's what. One of this year's projects focuses on the complexity and detail of a biome (yup, back to biomes and 6th graders again) through studying the whole-is-greater-than-the-parts aspect of pointillist art.

One of the most well-known employers of the technique was Georges Seurat, artist of The Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.

Much commentary can be found about pointillism and this painting in particular, with emphasis on Seurat's techniques, motivation, and comparisons to his contemporaries, but my favorites are the Pulitzer Prize winning musical stage production, Sunday in the Park with George (with Mandy Patinkin, Bernadette Peters, and Brent Spiner), and of course, Ferris Bueller's Day Off:

 

Though Seurat and other pointillists offer a multitude of fine examples of the technique, the official master work for this project is Big Emma by Chuck Close.

Close employs the same principles of combining areas of color by proximity to give the desired color effect when viewed at a distance. These wobbly donuts of color a meaningless individually, but as part of the complete work, each plays an important role.

The same goes for both the biomes that are the focus of the research for the students, and for the murals we will ultimately be completing as a class. Color isn't easy for everyone. It isn't even easy for everyone to see, let alone understand the theory. This should prove to be an interesting project.

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