Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Day 17 - An Art Piece

This painting is A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat. Seurat was an Impressionist painter and this is one of the best, if not the best, examples of pointillism. The entire painting is made up of little dots of color. If you get too close, it looks like the pixels in a low resolution digital print.

The painting is huge (almost 7' by 10') and took over two years to complete. It is on display at the Art Institute of Chicago. I saw it there several years ago and purchased a tote bag in the gift shop there with the painting on it.

It is also the inspiration for Stephen Sondheim's musical Sunday in the Park with George. I like Sondheim's shows because the lyrics are always so intricate and oftentimes quite funny. This show features a song called "The Day Off," in which Georges sings what the dogs in the painting are thinking. This includes one of my favorite lines, "that's the puddle where the poodle did the piddle." If you haven't seen it, you should check it out. You can find it on Netflix; I just added it to Jim's queue.

1 comment:

Sara said...

Well, there are worse things than staring at the water on a Sunday.
Also the captcha on this page is "alcohol". The robots ARE taking over.