Thursday and Friday afternoons on the bank of Tiffany Creek: a re-creation of Seurat's 'La Grande Jatte.'(Brief Article)

The play on words in the title of this article was the advertisement in our community for the most exciting project I have been involved with in my twenty-six years of teaching. Students in art and math classes at Boyceville High School recreated Georges Seurat's famous post-impressionistic painting, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, in life-sized proportions in a park on the banks of a small stream in Western Wisconsin.

We have been encouraged in our school to integrate learning situations with other subjects and teachers. This project fulfilled that objective. By the time the piece was ready for viewing, over one hundred and fifty students and five teachers had become involved.

Cardboard Characters

The project began in the art classes with a review of the unique painting style of French artist Georges Seurat. The students were amazed at how formally, and what seemed to be uncomfortably, dressed the people appeared to be, especially for a leisurely Sunday afternoon on the banks of a river.

We were lucky enough to get twenty-five cardboard refrigerator-boxes from a furniture and appliance store. The boxes, when cut apart, gave us enough six and one-half foot pieces of cardboard to make life-size re-creations of all the figures in Seurat's painting.

Each of the advanced art students chose one of the fifty or so characters from the painting and made a drawing which was transferred to the cardboard. They found that when trying to emulate Seurat's pointillist painting technique, it made sense to underpaint the base colors of the character first in a conventional painting manner. Finally, the students brought the figures to life using dots of color to shade and highlight the characters. It was great to view the rich colors that resulted from shading or highlighting objects using dots of pure color placed next to each other.

Putting Art into Perspective

The project then moved to the math department where algebra and geometry classes became involved. The students worked in small groups to figure out the space that was needed to make our life-sized characters fit with visually correct perspective. We were all amazed to learn that we needed a rectangular space that would measure thirty-five yards wide by one hundred yards deep. Both the math and art students looked at four different sites before choosing the one that looked the best and could also handle the crowds of people we were hoping to attract.

Staking Out a Site

The math teachers talked to my students about their findings and I visited the math classes and told them about Seurat and his art. The math students figured out a grid in which each of the fifty characters would be located and they also staked the site for the figures. I was amazed with how familiar the math students and teachers became with the painting as they could recognize and locate a character in the space grid without referring back to the painting.

The math students realized the real life application of their work as groups tried out their theories outside of the classroom when larger spaces needed to be worked with and analyzed for mathematical and visual accuracy. With their theories completed, the math classes moved to the site and students took the positions of the characters so that we could begin to see what we had been visualizing in our heads for so many weeks.

We decided to hold the event on a Thursday and Friday in mid-May. One of my students made color posters in the computer lab advertising the event. We also wrote articles explaining the event for our district newsletter and local newspapers. We decided to try to really make news in our small community, so we invited two television news stations from our neighboring city to cover the event.

A Masterpiece, Piece by Piece

On the day before the scheduled event a team of students pounded 2 x 4" lumber pieces into the ground to provide a structure for the cardboard figures. The installation was finally assembled and it was definitely worth our efforts as the visual masterpiece unfolded before our eyes.

During the viewing hours of the installation, a loudspeaker informed onlookers about Seurat and the famous painting plus facts explaining our project. Between the recorded narratives, small ensembles from our music department played instrumental numbers that might have been played in a Paris park at the turn of the century.

The project was a great learning experience from many different perspectives. There was a definite feeling of camaraderie between students from many different classes all realizing that their efforts were needed and appreciated. In this small Wisconsin community, Seurat and his A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte has been experienced to the fullest.

Donald C. Austrum is a junior-senior art teacher in the Boyceville Community School District in Boyceville, Wisconsin.