Been busy this week and between a server outage last weekend and life - didn’t have a chance to post even though I wanted to.

Anyway, today I went with a friend to see Georges Seurat: The Drawings at MOMA that will be on till January 7th 2008 - I’m sure I’ll be able to see the show at least once more, if not twice.

I was surprised at the sheer number of drawings in this show, as well as some paintings.   According to the online MOMA site for Georges Seurat - The Drawings:

“…Once described as “the most beautiful painter’s drawings in existence,” Georges Seurat’s mysterious and luminous works on paper played a crucial role in his career. Though Seurat is most often remembered as a Neo-Impressionist, the inventor of pointillism, and the creator of the painting, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, his incomparable drawings are among his–and modernism’s–greatest achievements. Working primarily with conté crayon on paper, Seurat explored the Parisian metropolis and its environs, abstracted figures, spaces, and structures, and dramatized the relationship between light and shadow, creating a distinct body of work that is a touchstone for the art of the twentieth century and today.”

My favorite thing about the online Georges Seurat site is the online sketchbooks - 4 of them - and I’d wish for something like that for my own sketchbooks - it’s almost as if the entire skecthbook, and the experience of opening it and browsing, can be done online.

As far as the drawings in the show, it’s clear many were done at dawn or dusk and and often more satisfying than Seurat’s paintings.   

Personally, I think much of what was appealing about Georges Seurat in the last century was the theory of optical color mixing applied to art.   As an artist, I don’t always feel Seurat’s technique suits what he was trying to do - often the brushstrokes are not varied enough and the paintings, overall, seem to take a very, very long time to do - in many cases, with not that much to show for all the extra time trying to optically mix colors.

I think maturity as an artist, can mean, finding a way to work that suits what the artist is trying to do (IE: for Georges Seurat, it might be painting from life during early morning and dusk) and building a technique and approach out of it.

But that’s just my opinion.