GEORGES SEURAT (French, 1859-1891) devised, without any tradition before him, a mathematically precise painting technique of color theory, where he juxtaposed tiny dots of contrasting colors close together, so that the viewers’ eyes blend the colors optically. This may be one of my earliest realizations about the magic of art, having an elementary school teacher show the class how all these tiny dots combine to make an enormous drawing of a park! His paintings took years, often with dozens of preparatory studies beforehand, and as a result his actual body of work is small (seven monumental paintings, hundreds of drawings and sketches, forty smaller scale paintings and sketches). The average artist doesn’t show their full potential until the two-thirds mark of their lives. Seurat painted his masterpiece at age 25 and died at age 31, the cause of death uncertain.
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