Photographer Mark Preuschl recreates Georges Seurat's famous impressionist painting

faberryman · Jul 31, 2023

Bigger is better?

I think Jeff Wall's photograph A Sudden Gust of Wind After Hokusai (1993) pales in comparison to Katsushika Hokusai's woodcut Yejiri Station, Province of Suruga (c. 1832). I'm not sure what, if anything, Jeff Wall's version brings to the table, much less why he made the image, other than perhaps he didn't have any better ideas at the time. The fact that elements of the image are "collaged digitally" doesn't earn him any points in my book. You can read a "flowery" description of the image on the Tate website which, not surprisingly, provides little in the way of enlightenment. I don't care how big and beautiful the Cibachrome transparency is if the image is utterly vacuous and devoid of creativity. I have a sneaking suspicion that when Jeff Wall dies, it will come out that he has spent his entire career secretly perpetuating a big joke on the art world. On the other hand, he is so damn serious when he is talking about himself, I don't think he has a sense of humor, so maybe not.

‘A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai)‘, Jeff Wall, 1993 | Tate

‘A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai)‘, Jeff Wall, 1993

www.tate.org.uk

markjwyatt · Jul 31, 2023

I like it because I argue that photography (especially "analog") is a pointillistic representation, namely the grains/ dye-clouds. Digital is sort of also (pixels), but most pointillistic images (color or B&W) do rely on primaries (e.g. B/W or R/G/B or some other set of primaries for color) while digital share the "points", but not the color primaries make-up (at least not directly as each pixel is reduced to a hue/saturation made up from primaries).

Here is my "Saturday In the Park"- completely candid, and named based on Chicago (who may have considered Seurat in naming the song) and Seraut.

Saturday In the Park by Mark Wyatt, on Flickr

Pieter12 · Jul 31, 2023

Copying the masters is generally part of any art education curriculum. That is why you will often see young folks at the museum making sketches of art on display. However, it is to teach technique, composition, color, to try to get inside the original artist's head, so to speak. The copies are not intended to be anything but a learning exercise, not an end product.

Sirius Glass · Jul 31, 2023

Alan Edward Klein said:
Isn't there a saying that goes something like plagiarism is the highest form of flattery.

Until it is your work being plagiarized and they are making money.

Pieter12 · Jul 31, 2023

Alan Edward Klein said:
Isn't there a saying that goes something like plagiarism is the highest form of flattery.

The saying is "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery." Big difference. Plagiarism is passing something off as own's own creation--basically theft and deception. Imitiation acknowledges it is copying.

VinceInMT · Jul 31, 2023

Pieter12 said:
Copying the masters is generally part of any art education curriculum. That is why you will often see young folks at the museum making sketches of art on display. However, it is to teach technique, composition, color, to try to get inside the original artist's head, so to speak. The copies are not intended to be anything but a learning exercise, not an end product.

Quite true. In the painting classes I took just a couple years ago we did that. In one assignment we selected an artist we admired and did two versions of one of their works, one that was a copy and the 2nd, the same scene but changing the time of day Or tone in some way. I selected Edward Hopper and discovered that the simplicity in his work was not so simple to emulate. Another reason to copy work is to really spend some time with it, like in terms of hours. None of these “copies” will ever appear in my portfolio but served a purpose that I carry with me today.

VinceInMT · Jul 31, 2023

markjwyatt said:
I like it because I argue that photography (especially "analog") is a pointillistic representation, namely the grains/ dye-clouds. Digital is sort of also (pixels), but most pointillistic images (color or B&W) do rely on primaries (e.g. B/W or R/G/B or some other set of primaries for color) while digital share the "points", but not the color primaries make-up (at least not directly as each pixel is reduced to a hue/saturation made up from primaries)….

This is something I have spent the last year or so doing in my art with my interest in how images are constructed from grains of silver. I’ve been using my own photographs as reference and creating images by stippling, that is, making dots on paper with black ink. (In contrast, pointillism uses paint dots in different colors that when viewed combine in the brain to appear as different hues.) I use dots of different sizes (.20mm to .50mm) and am careful not to get them too close together, varying the sizes and distances to create different values. From a bit of a distance the images look like a black and white drawing but from up close the dots are evident. This is not unlike half-tone newspaper images but my dots are more randomly arranged. I have a solo show of 7 of these images at the local university gallery through the summer.

Pieter12 · Jul 31, 2023

VinceInMT said:
This is something I have spent the last year or so doing in my art with my interest in how images are constructed from grains of silver. I’ve been using my own photographs as reference and creating images by stippling, that is, making dots on paper with black ink. (In contrast, pointillism uses paint dots in different colors that when viewed combine in the brain to appear as different hues.) I use dots of different sizes (.20mm to .50mm) and am careful not to get them too close together, varying the sizes and distances to create different values. From a bit of a distance the images look like a black and white drawing but from up close the dots are evident. This is not unlike half-tone newspaper images but my dots are more randomly arranged. I have a solo show of 7 of these images at the local university gallery through the summer.

Stipple illustrations were fairly popular in the 90's. I believe the WSJ and the LA Times still use the technique for the little headshot journalist portraits at the start of staff reporters' articles.

DREW WILEY · Jul 31, 2023

Somehow imitation ice milk never tastes like real ice cream. That goes for Jeff Wall too. It's staged, and that's exactly how it looks. And yes, just more Casino wallpaper faux scenery as far as I'm concerned, except in disgusting Vegas they do it bigger and better.

cliveh · Jul 31, 2023

Pieter12 said:
Inspiration or homage is not quite the same as mindless copying or recreating. The photo is such a slavish copy of the Seurat, and it pales in comparison. For me, it needs to be part of a larger body of work of other recreations to hold water.

Could not agree more.

markjwyatt · Jul 31, 2023

VinceInMT said:
This is something I have spent the last year or so doing in my art with my interest in how images are constructed from grains of silver. I’ve been using my own photographs as reference and creating images by stippling, that is, making dots on paper with black ink. (In contrast, pointillism uses paint dots in different colors that when viewed combine in the brain to appear as different hues.) I use dots of different sizes (.20mm to .50mm) and am careful not to get them too close together, varying the sizes and distances to create different values. From a bit of a distance the images look like a black and white drawing but from up close the dots are evident. This is not unlike half-tone newspaper images but my dots are more randomly arranged. I have a solo show of 7 of these images at the local university gallery through the summer.

Interesting. I am pretty sure that when I briefly studied art in college it was mentioned that some Pointilists were mimicking photography, but with limited searches on the internet I was not able to confirm that (well, maybe until now!). I did find examples of Pointilists who worked in India Ink, and used strictly block dots. Also, for color Pointilism, they key that ties it back to B&W is that the Pointilists used Primary color dots to create the color spectrum. So in B&W, primaries are black and white, while in color they are [typically] RGB (though I could see CMYK as interesting as the black could be used for controlling saturation- maybe add white also or just use paper/background color).

Here are some examples of pointillism, including monochrome.

18 inspiring examples of pointillism

These stunning examples of pointillism show the power of the humble dot.

www.creativebloq.com

DREW WILEY · Jul 31, 2023

Of course Pointillists were influenced by photography, as well as by emerging understanding of how human color perception works. It wasn't all that long after that Autochrome followed, and proved things in its own way. So Seurat gained scientific attention as well. And Degas certainly was certainly influenced by photography in a compositional sense. That's a whole different thing than clumsily imitating something and trying to pass it off as somehow equal - OK if someone is just having some fun doing it, but potentially pretentious otherwise.

In formal jargon, there are no "primaries", secondaries, or tertiaries in black and white work - just a gray scale, even if you choose only the extremes. Black never controls color saturation - it only shades it. And few black pigments are actually pure black - they have their own color inflections which come out with dilution. "Saturation" refers to the purity and intensity of any given hue; and in that respect, black in a contaminant, and alters that.

Pieter12 · Jul 31, 2023

markjwyatt said:
Interesting. I am pretty sure that when I briefly studied art in college it was mentioned that some Pointilists were mimicking photography, but with limited searches on the internet I was n opt able to confirm that (well, maybe until now!). I did find examples of Pointilists who worked in India Ink, and used strictly block dots. Also, for color Pointilism, they key that ties it back to B&W is that the Pointilists used Primary color dots to create the color spectrum. So in B&W, primaries are black and white, while in color they are [typically] RGB (though I could see CMYK as interesting as the black could be used for controlling saturation- maybe add white also or just use paper/background color).

Here is one of the first entries for "pointilism India ink" on Google images.

I kind of doubt it. Pointillism as a term was coined in the late 1880s as a mockery of the technique being developed and used by painters. I don't think any of the pointillist painters worked in black and white paint or ink of paper at that time. Although Daguerre presented his process 50 years earlier, grain was not evident, silver grain was probably not something ubiquitous until the early 20th century. I believe stippling technique in black and white illustration may have come about because of its ease of reproduction, not mimicking photographic grain.

DREW WILEY · Jul 31, 2023

They might have done preliminary compositional studies in a monochrome medium just like many painters do, as well as to practice "pointing". After they were driven mad by it, maybe the mental hospital used paint by numbers kits as therapy.

Pieter12 · Jul 31, 2023

DREW WILEY said:
They might have done preliminary compositional studies in a monochrome medium just like many painters do, as well as to practice "pointing". After they were driven mad by it, maybe the mental hospital used paint by numbers kits as therapy.

The "point" of pointillism is to reproduce the spectrum of colors using just a few of them. A monochrome study wouldn't be of much use. And if as you previously stated, the pointillists were somehow influenced by the Autochrome, why were they derided by the critics? They were more derivative of the impressionists, using unconventional techniques and palettes to render their scenes.

btaylor · Jul 31, 2023

So many grumps! Can't it just be a fun exercise/homage to a well loved painting? In all seriousness... it's an art joke, and I think a successful one.

Alex Benjamin · Jul 31, 2023

DREW WILEY said:
Of course Pointillists were influenced by photography, as well as by emerging understanding of how human color perception works. It wasn't all that long after that Autochrome followed, and proved things in its own way. So Seurat gained scientific attention as well. And Degas certainly was certainly influenced by photography in a compositional sense.

Degas was himself a photographer, practicing the art very intensely in 1895 and 1896 — four years after Seurat's death —, and in his case I wouldn't call it being influenced by photography, but more of a dialogue between two art forms.

The case is not the same for pointillism, which owes nothing to photography. Seurat's main influences were the scientific works of Michel Eugène Chevreul, notably The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colours, and their Application to the Arts. This dates from 1839 (French version), so I would nuance the "emerging" understanding of how human color perception works.

The autochrome process was invented in 1903, 12 years after Seurat's death.

On Degas and photography:

Pieter12 · Jul 31, 2023

btaylor said:
So many grumps! Can't it just be a fun exercise/homage to a well loved painting? In all seriousness... it's an art joke, and I think a successful one.

You hit the nail on the head. It is an art joke—I just don’t think the photographer and some here realize it.

VinceInMT · Jul 31, 2023

Pieter12 said:
… I don't think any of the pointillist painters worked in black and white paint or ink of paper at that time.…

Seurat did. Here are some studies he did for “La Grande Jatte.”

https://boldbrush.com/blog/169424/seurats-studies-for-la-grande-jatte

BTW, Seurat preferred the name ”Divisionism” and was considered part of the neo-impressionists. Unfortunately, he died young but he was an influence on Matisse and Signac.

Also, I doubt that the pointillists were influenced by Autochromes as their work was in the 1880s and 1890s and the Autochrome was patented in the early 1900s.

DREW WILEY · Jul 31, 2023

Well that's interesting. Seurat didn't "point" his preliminary black and white studies at all, but used textured fabric to simulate the effect.

I never implied Autochrome influenced Pointillism; but it could well have been the other way around to some extent. It overlapped within a single generation.

Yeah, these threads take on a life of their own, even if the basis for them might be a spoof. Something to talk about, at least.

MattKing · Jul 31, 2023

btaylor said:
So many grumps! Can't it just be a fun exercise/homage to a well loved painting? In all seriousness... it's an art joke, and I think a successful one.

I wouldn't use "joke" - I think it is intended to be fun, and playful, and educational.

VinceInMT · Jul 31, 2023

MattKing said:
I wouldn't use "joke" - I think it is intended to be fun, and playful, and educational.

Yes, and here is a bit of background on why they did it:

Art Lovers and Volunteers Recreate Georges Seurat’s Famous Painting in Real Life

https://mymodernmet.com/seurat-recreation-beloit/

foc · Aug 1, 2023

VinceInMT said:
Yes, and here is a bit of background on why they did it:

Art Lovers and Volunteers Recreate Georges Seurat’s Famous Painting in Real Life

https://mymodernmet.com/seurat-recreation-beloit/

Thanks for the link, interesting read.

The links at the bottom of the article has more links to other photographers trying to recreate classic images.
The one I liked was this:
Photographer Recreates Philippe Halsman’s Iconic 1948 “Dalí Atomicus” Image

grain elevator · Aug 1, 2023

What baffles me most in all this is why someone interested in visual arts would use Comic Sans.

Don_ih · Aug 1, 2023

grain elevator said:
Comic Sans

It's the universal font for all such things. Go look at any local corkboard.

There is really a lot of criticism here of something that was just a community event. Do you people actually think there was supposed to be a "high art" result?

Photographer Mark Preuschl recreates Georges Seurat's famous impressionist painting

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Art Lovers and Volunteers Recreate Georges Seurat’s Famous Painting in Real Life​

Art Lovers and Volunteers Recreate Georges Seurat’s Famous Painting in Real Life​

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Art Lovers and Volunteers Recreate Georges Seurat’s Famous Painting in Real Life

Art Lovers and Volunteers Recreate Georges Seurat’s Famous Painting in Real Life