Pointillism

Pointillism is a painting technique in which color is applied to the canvas as a dense field of small, distinct dots of pure, unmixed pigment, rather than blended on the palette or with a brush, so that the individual colors optically merge in the viewer's eye when the painting is viewed from an appropriate distance, an effect its inventors described using contemporary color theory as optical mixing. Georges Seurat developed the technique in the 1880s, working with the color theory of Michel Eugene Chevreul and the physicist Ogden Rood, and demonstrated it most famously in his large canvas A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, painted using countless individually placed dots of complementary color built up over roughly two years. Seurat's close collaborator Paul Signac continued and promoted the technique after Seurat's early death, and the paint-application method itself, small discrete marks of unmixed color relying on the viewer's eye to blend them, influenced later painters well beyond the original circle, distinct from the Neo-Impressionist movement built up around it.