Georges Seurat's, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte is one of those rare pieces that's style has tried to been recreated by other artists, but has never been done successfully. This work has transcended all other works of its time not because it has a deep down meaning or emotion, but rather because it could relate to an everyday summer day that mostly everyone has experience before. There is something about this work that makes it much more powerful and important than it appears to be. Any work that was finished many years ago and still relate to people today is something very special. Perhaps it was because Seurat painted it with a scientific theory know as pointillism.(1).
Seurat understood and loved the use of shapes and patterns, but he took these basic ideas and pushed them to the next level. His new scientific style that he created himself known as pointillism proved to be a very unusual and affective way of painting. Pointillism is the use of painting with dots of color rather than using brush strokes. Each dot is used side by side to enable the viewer's eye blend the colors together optically. The amazing thing about Seurat is that he painted it when he was twenty-five years old, already having his scientific theory about pointillism under his belt. It is sad that he could not created any more works because he died at the age of thirty in 1891. You wonder where and what the world would be like today if many of the extremely talented artists of the past had a chance to live a full life.(1).
A Sunday on La Grande Jatte still uses basic artistic methods to give the work a sense of depth and movement. The work uses linear perspective to give us an idea of what is important and who is interacting with whom in the painting. Most of the implied lines of the painting start at the people's eyes and work there way towards the lake. There are other implied lines in the painting that still start from the eyes of people, but are directed towards other people.