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PRIME: THE
CONTRIBUTION OF ARTISTS, continued
Renoir
had achieved a form of luminescence, by scumbling his
brush thinly loaded with paint over a neutral to warm
ground, leaving the ground revealed. Previously, Dutch
painters had employed layers of transparent and semi-transparent
glazes over varying grey toned under-painting to achieve
a form of luminescence. The effect in Seurat‘s work
however, was called, pointillism,
a technique broadly similar to that later adopted by printers
in the mass-production of colour pictures using a limited
number of pigments and by television engineers, to reproduce
colour pictures with red, green, and blue coloured dots
of light. The pointillist method, did not encourage
an immediacy in the work, and appeared to be often employed
rather mechanically. Seurat got around this by making
tonal drawings on a heavily textured surface, or employing
zigzag squiggles of gouache as used on The
Client. (see also the work of Mary Cassatt, page
26) As a mature painter,
Camille
Pissarro met with Paul Signac and Seurat in the Autumn
of 1885, and acknowledging the importance of the scienti˛c
theories evolved by Seurat, began to use the pointillist
technique. He probably used a palette of twelve pigments;
including lead or zink white, light and deep cadmium yellows,
vermilion red, alizarin lakes, cobalt violet, ultramarine
and cobalt blues, maybe cerulean blue, emerald, viridian
and chrome green. (footnote
13.)
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The
biggest boon for these artists, was the fact that
oil paint was ready ground and manufactured in tubes.
Long gone were the days, when William Turner had
to grind his own paints to render the dramatic English
landscapes in which curiously, pinks,
blues and yellows
predominated in the underpainting. Pissarro argued
that optical mixes were more luminous than the mixed
pigments based on the work of Chevruel, Scot Maxwell,
and the American, Ogden Rood. In my view, Pissarro‘s
The Apple pickers
has all the elements of a hot summer day. Both
warmth and coolness emanate from the colours in
the shadows. |
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The Apple Pickers, circa 1886, Camille Pissarro |
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