pointillism

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Art

Innumerable Dots Cloak the Energetic Dancers in Betty Acquah’s Pointillistic Paintings

Movement, motion, and emotion permeate the joyful, pointillistic paintings by Ghanaian artist Betty Acquah. Rendering dancing children, costumed troupes, and their surroundings simultaneously, Acquah conveys celebratory moments by cloaking her scenes with countless dots of acrylic. “The background echoes the movement of figures and therefore create(s) a pulsating surface that brings the composition alive,” she tells Colossal. “By extending dabs of color in the subject matter into the background and vice-versa, an illusion of movement is created.”

Each richly layered piece blurs the figures’ defining features, casting them as anonymous, everyday people. “Women are the unsung heroines of the Ghanaian Republic,” says a statement from Kuaba Gallery, which represents the artist. “The images she depicts tell of ordinary women working courageously towards a greater Ghana.”

Born near the Atlantic Ocean, Acquah is currently exploring beachscapes, aerial, abstract compositions, and the connection between younger women and their socioeconomic statuses. You can find more of her recent works at Kuaba Gallery. (via Women’s Art)

 

Animation Illustration

1,440 Portraits Emerge from a Single Ink Drawing in a New Animation by Jake Fried

In an impressive feat of dedication and patience, artist Jake Fried (previously) spent seven months creating Brain Wave, a hand-drawn animation using only ink and white-out. Fried reworked the same black-and-white drawing 1,440 times, scanning each new iteration into Photoshop and sequencing the drawings to play at 24 frames per second. He then added an original music track that frantically connects the hundreds of drawings into one 60-second video.

Centered both literally and narratively around a single, ever-changing face, the short animation takes the viewer through a wide range of emotions, settings, and themes. Because every frame is a new work of art, the piece as a whole feels like snapshots from a dream that have been remembered, recreated, and reassembled.

Working without an outline or storyboard, Fried explained to Vimeo that each successive drawing dictated what would come next. “There is an inherent logic or rhythm that emerges as I make the work, I have developed an instinct or gut-feeling for when the next frame is ready to be scanned. I can get quite obsessive about the smallest shifts within a fraction of a second.”  The filmmakers’s work will be featured later this month at the Flat Earth Film Festival in Seyðisfjörður, Iceland from February 10-14, 2019 and in a group exhibition at Mills Gallery in Boston from February 23 through April 28, 2019. To see more of Fried’s work online, follow him on Instagram. (via Vimeo Staff Picks)

 

Art

Vietnamese Landscapes Painted by Phan Thu Trang

Born in Hanoi, artist Phan Thu Trang paints decorative landscapes inspired by images of the city and Northern villages of Vietnam. In her colorful yet minimalistic paintings she works with limited colors and textures, focusing on only bare essentials to create each piece centered around billowing, pointillistic trees. See more of her work over at ArtBlue Studio in Singapore, and if you enjoyed these also check out Lieu Nguyen Huong Duong. (via Art of Animation)

Art Documentary

The Pixel Painter: A 97-Year-Old Man Who Draws Using Microsoft Paint from Windows 95

Meet Hal Lasko, mostly known as Grandpa, a 97-year-old man who uses Microsoft Paint from Windows 95 to create artwork that has been described as “a collision of pointillism and 8-Bit art.” Lasko, who is legally blind, served in WWII drafting directional and weather maps for bombing raids and later worked as a typographer (back when everything is done by hand) for clients such as General Tire, Goodyear and The Cleveland Browns before retiring in the 1970s. Decades after his retirement his family introduced him to Microsoft Paint and he never looked back. Approaching a century in age, Lasko is now having his work shown for the first time in an art exhibition and also has prints for sale online.

Watch this touching documentary short directed by Josh Bogdan which tells how Lasko discovered an entire new artistic career well into his 80s. If you liked this, also learn about 73-year-old Tatsuo Horiuchi who paints exclusively using the shape tool in Microsoft Excel

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Art Illustration

A Portrait Drawn by Hand with 2.1 Million Ink Dots to Aid Amnesiac Benjaman Kyle

In 2004 an unconscious man was discovered behind a fast food restaurant in Richmond Hill, Georgia. He had no belongings, severe sunburn, and was nearly blind from cataracts. The man also had absolutely no idea who he was. After months of ongoing evaluation from doctors and psychologists it was determined he was suffering from dissociative amnesia. He adopted the pseudonym Benjaman Kyle and has embarked on a search for his true identity sparking massive amounts of media coverage and even a short film, Finding Benjaman, by John Wikstrom. He is the only citizen in the United States officially listed as missing despite his whereabouts being known. One strange aspect of this predicament is that Kyle now lives completely in limbo: for the past 8 years he has been denied the ability to obtain a new social security number which in turn prevents him from opening a bank account or having a credit card. The government argues that he already has one, but despite the efforts of fingerprint matching, DNA tests, and exposure on television, he simply cannot determine his true identity.

After catching a screening of Finding Benjaman at the Tribeca Film Festival artist Miguel Endara was inspired to help in any way he could, which meant making art. Endara embarked on this portrait of Benjaman using stippling, a tedious technique which involves a pen, patience, and an obscene amount of dots. The portrait took nearly 138 hours to complete, and at a rate of 4.25 dots per second, he estimates the piece contains roughly 2.1 million of them. The hope is to spread awareness for Bengaman’s plight and to help raise money through the sale of prints to support a petition to get him a new social security number. You can learn more about the drawing here.

 

Art

New Date Stamp Pointillism Paintings by Federico Pietrella

I can’t remember the last time I saw the actual use of a rubber date stamp, most libraries exchanged them for fancy barcodes and other digital systems a decade ago. But Italian artist Federico Pietrella who lives and works in Berlin has a fantastic use for them in his paintings made from thousands of densely stamped ink dates. In his enormous ink artworks Pietrella always stamps the current date, thus each of his pieces contains a clear timeline of the days he worked on it, often spanning two months. You can see much more on his website and watch a brief interview with artist courtesy of Deutsche Welle.