pointillist
1
9.7
- adjective
- /ˈpɔɪntɪlɪst/
- Specialized
:
puntillista
- 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
9.8
Using many small dots to make a picture
A surface covered with many small dots, often made by paint or ink
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.