Seurat-the-dots.

My son's school has an "Art in the Classroom" program in which parents make presentations about art to students. I was assigned to present the French Post-Impressionist painter Georges Seurat to my son's second-grade class. Rather than simply telling students about Seurat and pointillism, I wanted them to explore this technique for themselves. The assignment was to work together to create their own scaled-down version of Seurat's 7 x 10' (2 x 3 m) painting, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte.

Cooperative Learning 

The approach of having each of the students contribute a piece to the overall painting incorporated two key principles of cooperative learning that help insure that group work is successful: individual accountability and positive group interdependence. Students also learned the pointillism process, and the key idea of pointillism: that the brain can assemble a seemingly meaningless arrangement of dots into a coherent image.

Scaling the Artwork

I chose to make a 30 x 40"(76 x 102 cm) copy of the painting to fit proportionally on a standard-sized poster board. I downloaded a copy of the painting from the Art Institute of Chicago Web site and printed it out onto a transparency sheet.

Pattern-making Procedure

I taped the large blank sheet of paper onto a blackboard and used an overhead projector to project the image onto the paper, adjusting the distance until the image fits onto the paper. Then using a pencil, I traced the main outlines of the picture onto the paper. Using push-pins, attach the traced picture to a Styrofoam poster board. (Another way to make a scaled copy is to print out the picture at large magnification so that it prints onto several pages, and join the pages together.

Creating the Pieces

I cut the picture into pieces: one for each student. Most of the pieces I cut out had curvy edges; these non-regular shapes helped make the final product visually interesting. As you cut out each piece, re-pin it to the poster board. Label the back of the piece with a number and write the same number on the board where the piece goes. This will help in assembling the final picture.

Initial Classroom Session

I told students about Seurat and showed them reproductions of his paintings. Their assignment was to use markers to color in the picture using pointillism. I gave each student their piece, and suggested they look at the artwork to get an idea of the colors that Seurat used, but they were free to color in their piece with any colors using dots.

Reassembling the Picture

When all the pieces were colored, I glued the pieces down on a fresh poster board. I used a repositionable adhesive product to glue the pieces to the board. The students named their picture Seurat the Dots.

When looking at the picture up close, one saw dots. From a distance, one saw the overall picture more clearly. The pointillism effect really worked! The method works well for this type of composite coloring since even if neighboring pieces were colored with non-matching colors, the mind interprets the image in a sensible and appealing way.

Editor's Note: See this month's Looking and Learning on page 31 for a reproduction of Georges Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte.

NATIONAL STANDARD

Students understand and apply media, techniques, and processes.

WEB LINK

Chicago Art Institute, www.artic. edu/artaccess/AA_Impressionist/ pages/IMP_7.shtm1#

Victor J. Donnay is professor of Mathematics, Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. [e-mail]