POINTILLISM

Pointillism is a style of painting in which small distinct points of primary colors create the impression of a wide selection of secondary and intermediate colors.

The technique relies on the perceptive ability of the eye and mind of the viewer to mix the color spots into a fuller range of tones and is related closely to Divisionism, a more technical variant of the method. It is a style with few serious practitioners and is notably seen in the works ofSeurat, Signac and Cross. The term Pointillism was first coined by art critics in the late 1880s to ridicule the works of these artists and is now used without its earlier mocking connotation.

The practice of Pointillism is in sharp contrast to the more common methods of blending pigments on a palette or using the many commercially available premixed colors. Pointillism is analogous to the four-color CMYK printing process used by some color printers and large presses, and to a lesser degree to computer monitors and television sets which use tiny dots of primary red, green, and blue to render color.