June Morning

by Delaynna Trim, Mabee-Gerrer Museum of Art Curator of Collections

June Morning by William H. Singer

It is June and flowers are blooming everywhere! This is the theme for one of the paintings in the Mabee-Gerrer Museum of Art - June Morning or Buckwheat in Bloom. This piece is in the style of pointillism. Pointillism is a technique where the artist uses many small dots of color and allows the viewer’s brain to combine them into the necessary objects and colors.

Pointillism was developed by George Seurat

A Sunday On La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat, 1884

and Paul Signac in 1886. George Seurat is most known for his painting Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. Did you know that he first called the technique Chromoluminarism? Imagine saying that 10 times fast! Chromo means color. Lumin means light. Chromoluminarism is about how the separate colors of light reflected by the paint mixes visually. Most TV and computer screens operate in a similar way.

The other title, Buckwheat in Bloom, refers to the flowers in the painting. Buckwheat is a flowering plant in the knotweed family. It is typically used as a cover crop to keep soil from eroding.

Close-up of June Morning

William H. Singer, the painter of June Morning, was born in Pennsylvania in 1868, but moved to Paris with his wife Anna to study at the Académie Julien. Later they moved to Holland and then during WWI, Norway. He died during the Nazi occupation of Norway in 1943. He is known for his pointillism pieces.

If you stand far away from a pointillism painting, all the colors blend thanks to your brain automatically forming shapes and patterns. But, if you stand close to a pointillism painting, then all the dots just look like dots. Next time you are at the MGMoA, try this with June Morning. In fact, this summer is a great time to do this as the museum is FREE all summer long! Thanks to the Avedis Foundation, BancFirst and St. Gregory’s Abbey, we have free admission from June through August.

Pointillism Art Project Supplies:

White cardstock or heavy paper

Acrylic paint

Q-tips

Pencil

Lightly sketch your design on the paper. Then choose a color of paint to begin with. Dip your Q-tip in that color of acrylic. But instead of painting like with a brush, you will start dabbing dots of color. Once you are done with that color, choose another color and start dabbing dots of the new color. Keep going until your paper is full of colorful dots. Then, step back and let the magic happen.

For more information and inspiration, check out https://mgmoa.org/art-projects