Why Do I Paint With Dots
About thirty years ago, when I stated painting, I knew nothing about Pointillism. In fact, I didn’t know much about any particular style of painting.
At the time, I simply got some paints, a few brushes, and simply began experimenting,
Yes, I was teaching myself to paint. And a few weeks into this, while painting some trees, I used some dots to show some undergrowth leaves in the composition.
As I worked with this image, I began to wonder if it was possible to paint a whole painting using dots. Could I do this?
Gradually, the dots I painted began to take on some kind of expression.
And it also seemed the dots were mingling, almost like atoms, on the surface of the canvas. Soon I was using colours to define shapes without hard lines as dots of tree trunks became the air and bits of air became the tree trunks. , but the shapes didn’t need hard lines separating one from another. This mingling of dots was kind of fun and I began to peruse this further.
Learning From the Dots
Painting with dots became an exploration of how to do it.
My learning curve eventually took me to layering the dots. I wasn’t following a particular technique or trying to reproduce something I had seen somewhere else. I was simply painting a flow of dots, adding layers and watching what happened.
There was no art wisdom behind what I was doing. I was teaching myself. No reference books, No workshops or art classes. No social meetups with artists.
Basically, I was alone in my studio, listening to my own thoughts about what I was doing with dots on canvas.
I continued this for five years or so, and my paintings kept evolving. I loved what I was doing.
Discovering Pointillism
It was a few years later, at a public art gallery, when I saw a Pointillist painting by Georges Seurat.
It was painted with tiny, tiny specks of colour.
And I felt an immediate energy connection with it.
This was a moment of insight for me. Seurat’s painting didn’t change the way I created. I simply realized that what I had been exploring on my own in my studio had a place in the art world. My dots were like Seurat’s specks of colour.
That said, Seurat’s creative purpose and mine were quite different.
His exploration involved optical mixing — individual colours interacting visually to create the experience of other colours. A speck of yellow beside a speck of blue helping the viewer see it as green.
My purpose in painting with dots had become something else.
Everything Is One
For me, the dots are about exploring how everything around us is one. How everything, the atoms, mingle.
It became image without hard lines and this seemed important to me,
Dots of colour can move into the tree and from the tree into the air. Shapes mingle with other shapes. Colours mingle with other colours. Something a bold expression and sometimes subtle.
As I paint, thousands of individual dots can become trees, light, shadows, earth and sky. From a distance, they come together as an image. Up close, they return to individual marks of colour.
Over time, layers and layers of dots became my way of exploring that interconnectedness.
When I began painting, I wasn’t trying to become a Pointillist. I didn’t even know what Pointillism was.
I began with some paints, some brushes and curiosity about what a dot could do.
More than thirty years later, I’m still exploring.
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