Two Sailboats at Grandcamp
Georges Seurat
GEORGES SEURAT, 1885. OIL ON PANEL.
Known for his exacting, pointillist style where thousands of precise points of color create a soaring, monumental work - this painting is an example of Seurat’s process. Painting en plein air, which was the vogue of the day where artists would paint outside from life to capture the extreme present of light and atmosphere, Seurat would take these studies back to his studio to transform them into larger works. Out in the wild, the points are transformed into broad, loose brushstrokes and the blues, grays, and greens of the Normandy coastline are suggested by the evidence of a human hand, smearing work on the panel. Seurat, like so many of the avant-garde artists of his day, spent his summer in the boating towns of Northern France. The slower pace of life let him develop his process and style, and it is in these small studies on panels that we can see the inner working of his mind, grappling with his ambitions to capture space and time in a radical new way.