Pointillist portrait

I’m struggling to get a good image of this painting, but these should give a general idea. The one of the painting on the wall is closer to the actual colours and also gives a sense of the painting in the round. Its 30cmx30cm. I dismissed painting a portrait in this style for ages and didn’t think it would be worth trying. I have only seen very few pointillist portraits that I felt were successful. Seurat did make some of the most beautiful drawings ever made, but I wasn’t sure about the painted portraits. I’m still not completely sure about this, but after painting some landscapes using a ‘pointillist’ method I thought why not attempt it? Even with the landscapes it’s only recently that I realised it was a way of working that I could potentially stick to. This didn’t turn out to be the case as I’m restricted in terms of the amount of time I can spend on these things.

I wanted to paint a picture that was pure decoration with no hierarchy of interest or action across the entirety of the painted surface. I like the way dots animate the surface as they interact with each other but there are no greater or weaker forces. There is a great beauty and purity in the colour relations that occur, and a magic in each colour’s transformation relative to others. But I find i have to be careful as they can become visually jarring. This has to do with the ground I started working on which is a mixture of burnt sienna and umber; if its too dark the marks are set too high a contrast against it. While I talk about ‘dots’ they are really small brushstrokes, moving in different directions. If they are too uniform they look mechanical, boring, repetitive. I am conscious of moving in different directions with each stroke of the brush, but also mindful of the size of each, they need to average the same size. Some of Seurat’s paintings have a number of different size dots which I don’t think work as well. At least this is not what I am after.

I have been told off for calling myself a ‘neo’ pointillist, but really I don’t think there is any other way to describe my working method in these paintings. I am not a neo pointillist like Kusama, who is only really interested in dots for their own sake, their decoration and roundness regardless of size. or as a kind of therapy. They feel like the hallucinations of her mental illness. Strictly speaking, pointillism was about turning art and painting into a scientific method; religious paintings worshiping Science and the science of colour theory, a new science at the time Seurat was working. At its worst it fell into dogmatism in some hands. As art isn’t science and the moment pointillist paintings became dogmatic they lost some of the magic of art. I am less interested in this myself. In my paintings results are achieved by having no method. Just keep working, one brushstroke after another.