This is a reproduction of a drawing by Seurat of folds in a dress. As I was looking at it, it struck me that you could see the same folds in the paper if he hadn’t drawn all over it. Don’t get me wrong: I’ve admired Seurat my whole life. Though I’ve mostly studied his paintings, his conte crayon drawings have such a spooky photosensitivity, so camera-like, to me they convey a kind of spiritual detachment. This detachment a viewer can participate in simply by viewing these drawings.
But the close up study above pointed out a difference of art between his paintings and drawings. I think the study made me aware of the paper because he’s using the paper’s grain as a means to make his marks effective. Using a lighter touch he creates a half-tone as his crayon blackens the highest points of the surface and leaves the lowest points unmarked. He creates an illusion of the quality of light on a surface (a dress) employing the quality of another surface (the paper). This use of the paper, I’ve done it a thousand times myself, strikes me as somehow incomplete as artwork. This incompleteness, as I said, makes me think of the actuality of the paper. I feel drawn to remember it and the selfless erasure it endured in aiding the artist.
In contrast, the pointilist marks of Seurat’s paintings polarize the artist’s work from the rest of nature. Here he accepts no help from his materials. He commands his materials and makes them do what he wishes. He will not even allow his colors to mix. That was his choice, that was his interest, his chosen means.
Human creators do not have access to the atomic level (artists anyway) and must discover their own smallest building block. Each must innovate an idiosyncratic truth to which a life’s work can be devoted. Rilke speaks of it in terms of Cezanne, Rodin, and his own poetry: “Somehow I too must discover the smallest constituent element, the cell of my art, the tangible immaterial means of expressing everything…” After this discovery the artist is free to become a laborer and to spend every minute of life working at “expressing everything.”
I don’t know if I agree with this sentiment. I acknowledge it as some kind of commandment in a history of evolving commandments. The opposite of this commandment has also proved its virtue. There is something to allowing the materials themselves to show off their textures, allowing a single color, perhaps found among debris in the street, to be the “smallest constituent element.” The artist offers the struggle to the viewer, to see a thing-in-itself aesthetically. That also has its spiritual identity. But that innovation too is something discovered long ago.
Still I find useful this idea of the artist’s search for a polarizing means. Seurat painted his strange dotty pictures. There is the quality of metaphor or conveyance or transfer about them. You look at them and you ask, “what is this strange thing he’s done, and why do I feel I recognize it? “
