pointillist
1
9.7
- adjective
- /ˈpɔɪntɪlɪst/
- Specialized
- Greenberg described Seurat's technique in Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Grand Jatte as a "pointillist, hyper-Impressionist method of filling color in that could manage a plausible illusion of deep space, but not of mass or volume within it."
Examples
-
It's the opposite of your experience with the ringed gentleman on the boulevard: the closer you look at a pointillist masterpiece, the more the details disintegrate, leaving you wishing you had kept your distance.
Academic text (2004) -
Smith's pointillist prose coolly and with remove gives voice to a cast of characters who struggle to connect the dots.
Blog text (3) -
His picture of the Jewish population in the United States and Puerto Rico is a pointillist one.
Blog text (5) -
If one were to dot frosting onto the cake, you could see each small area of the surface of the cake that has an individual point, like a pointillist piece of art.
Academic text (2008) -
What it came down to was an odd, pointillist plank-walk, notwithstanding we walked in place if it can be said we walked at all.
Fiction book (1997) -
With the splendor derived from pointillist detail, I'm getting a picture of Henry's ex-wife.
Fiction book (2000) -
The illustration is a parody of Seurat's painting, including a faithful replication of Seurat's famous pointillist technique.
Academic text (1992) -
Klieg lights: they were already collecting footage for the next campaign... ten-, twenty-, and thirty-second daubs of her husband, from which they would fashion pointillist portraits of him for mass viewing.
Fiction book (1998) -
Steig is the cartoonist of such emotions as greed or folly with near-pointillist caricature.
Academic text (1996) -
A fascinating characteristic of a pointillist painting is how the image changes from different viewing distances.
Synonyms
1
7.2
A surface covered with many small dots, often made by paint or ink
1
9.8
Using many small dots to make a picture
How Pointillistic
Surface Forms
Etymology
Pointillist comes from the French word pointillisme, which is built on point meaning 'dot'. So a pointillist painting is made of many tiny dots of color that together form a single image.