Good morning, my two favorite princesses!
I hope all is well in Florida this week. Today I am in a most-awful-very-bad mood. It happens sometimes. So, in an attempt to convince myself to not spend the entire day in a most-awful-very-bad mood, I have chosen a spectacularly happy piece of art to introduce you to this time.
This is a pointalist piece by a man named Paul Signac. He was one of the first people to paint in this style, although there were sort of a lot of people trying it all at once, so I don’t think we can say he invented it or anything like that. Signac was born in 1863, so was painting at the same time as Van Gogh and Monet…a lot of significant art seemed to be happening around that time! Pointalism is different from impressionism, which uses really short brush strokes that run into each other on the canvas (no hard edges) to make the picture; pointalists use teeny-tiny dots of colors that when you back away from them make a picture….but in the end it has a kind of impressionistic look – probably because it was all happening at the same time by artists who were sort of friends!
If you look at the first painting, the style is something that people think the Beatles invented in the 1960s…which amuses me. This was painted about a hundred years before the Beatles ever existed, and was probably influenced by things that came from hundreds of years before that.
One cool think about Paul Signac is that a “new” painting of his was found in 2010. In 1894 he stayed overnight in a hotel in Holland, and gave them a painting to pay for his room. They hung it on the wall and mostly forgot about it for over a hundred years before somebody realized it was a painting from a pretty famous guy! He was also the very first person to ever buy a painting from Matisse, so in addition to making his own art, he helped to encourage other artists to continue to paint, which makes him an excellent dude.
Anyway, I love his bright colors and happy shapes and patterns, and I think pointalism is really interesting, because it’s super hard to do really well – it takes a ton of planning and patience to make a beautiful painting made entirely of teeny tiny dots!
So now I am happier, having looked at and talked about these pretty things. Thank you for brightening my day from far away!
Know that I love you and that I think you’re awesome.
Hugs and kisses,
Auntie Paula
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