LINES, LINES, LINES…

In highlighting the edges of the characters and objects in the original image by giving it a glow against a dark background, the whole image is reduced to lines and outlines. Because of this, we start to become aware of the concentration and the quality of lines.

Characters in the foreground, in this case, the clown, the acrobats and the horse appear to have thicker and more definite lines. Incidentally, they are also the main characters in this whole image. The other characters and objects have a finer outline and tend to be more fuzzy, maybe because of the details that Seurat have included on them.

This is interesting because we often try to understand and analyse an image by looking at the shapes, sizes and colours, and less on the type and concentration of lines. Seurat, through his scientific precision in artmaking, besides being obsessed by the optical effects of colours, may also have had a systematic consideration for lines.