pointillism

'In fact, that elusive vibrancy of foliage reminds us once again of the ancestry of plants. At the same time that Engelmann was shining coloured lights on his seaweeds, the artist Georges Seurat was experimenting with his peinture optique, pointillism or, as we might now in our digital age call it, pixellation. This was his attempt to translate nature's vibrant realism onto paper. He used minute dots of pure colour in order to avoid the 'muddy' effect produced by mixing pigments. As far as plant foliage was concerned Seurat's coloured dots, no matter how small, were still enormous in comparison with those green bacterial lodgers, the chloroplasts. Nevertheless, he was on the right track, and every time we look at a leaf we confront nature's own three-dimensional, multi-scaled version of pointillism , the end product of symbiotic events which took place who knows how many billions of years ago'
james | hortus | leaves | pointillism