People

The first painting is one of the paintings with the most obvious theme of community, A Sunday on the La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat. The main subject of this painting is a group of people who are spending their leisure time lazing around the park or spending time with their loved ones. This painting is arguably Georges Seurat's most famous piece of work.

The work makes use of pointillism, a technique which Georges Seurat developed together with Paul Signac. The technique includes painting a layer of complementary colours was applied using horizontal brushstrokes. Then dots of pure colours also in complementary colours are applied to the give the appearance of tone and depth. Pointillism relies on the viewer's eyes to form the illusion of different tones of colour which makes it possible to distinguish figures in the piece of work. The pure colours used when creating the dots make the colours appear bright and vivid on the painting. Because of pointillism's reliance on the trick of the eye, the technique has been thought of "highly systematic and "scientific""(Art Institute of Chicago, nd). The painting took 2 years to complete.

This painting includes a large variety of people including children, animals, couples and families. There is also a mix of the well-dressed and casually dressed. Seurat had taken great pains into the creation of this piece as he had made several sketches trying to perfect the placement of the people, animals and objects in order to make the entire piece interesting to look at. He had said of the way the figures in the painting stand, "The Panathenaeans of Phidias formed a procession. I want to make modern people, in their essential traits, move about as they do on those friezes, and place them on canvases organized by harmonies of colour" (n.d) Although, it may also be interpreted that the poise and rigidity of the people in the painting is a representation of the attitude of the people who visited or stayed at La Grand Jatte, which were mainly rich Parisian people.

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When people think of the word "community", the images that most people will conjure up will most likely include people. A lot of times, when people talk about their community, they are talking about the people living in the same area as them as well as the people who frequent at the nearby park or shopping centre. These people are in the background of people’s memories, they are the people they pass by every day but don’t know personally. These people create the community and make a town or city what it is. They make the culture of the community its own and it is the community which makes every place unique. The works shown in this topic focuses on the people who make the communities their own special culture.

Georges Seurat

A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte

Oil on Canvas

78.7in x 236.2in

This work by Oona Hassim are an impressionist-inspired take on the crowd in Grand Central Station in New York. This work is a part of a solo exhibition comprising of works depicting life in London and New York. The main subject of the painting is the people and the energy which they create together by simply carrying out their daily activities.

These works exemplify how the community is defined as a whole because of the people who live there and making the place their own. As explained by Hassim, "Crowds are an integral part of the city and create its throbbing energy" (2014).

Hassim chose to use a variation of the impressionist technique which was inspired by Alberto Giacometti's paintings and drawings. The impressionist style of painting helped to capture the rhythm of the station as well as the atmosphere of the place. It can be seen with this painting as well as others that she had tried to capture the movement of the city in a way which is similar to the way that J.M.W Turner tried to capture movement of the landscapes he painted in some of his works. This work has warm undertones with bright or strong colours such as red or yellow layered on top to create a contrast. Hassim had created the effect of movement by applying layers of paint on the piece and then scraping them off before reapplying them again. This process is repeated several times until it has achieved the desired effect of capturing energy and movement.

Grand Central Station is one of the world's busiest train stations in the world with 21.6 million visitors in 2013(Travel+Leisure, 2014). This makes it a good backdrop to go along with the theme of the exhibition as well as what Hassim wanted to capture. She had purposely avoided painting faces so as to over characterise a scene and to keep the painting somewhat abstract. Faces also pose a risk of being a distraction from the main point of the artwork, which is the movement and ambience of the scene. She had managed to create a sense of peace amongst the chaos in these works by capturing consistent elements such as lights or windows, which balances the artwork and preventing it from becoming incomprehensible.

This work is an oil painting by Paul Cezanne, who has a post-impressionist style of painting. This piece of work is also considered one of Paul Cezanne's finest works and is currently hanging in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. This painting represents community as it depicts a group of people who come from the same community participating in an activity together. This piece shows how communities can bring people together and just how familiar people can become with each other. Obviously this level of familiarity is not common. However the activity that they are participating in together does not only have to be taken as what it is at surface level. It can also be taken to show how familiar communities can be mentally in the form of relationships and comfortability in doing most activities together even if they are not associating with each other.

Paul Cezanne had painted the background in a way that makes the sky come forward rather than eventually fade into the distance, which was common practice at the time. It can also be seen in the painting that short strokes were used in colouring the painting. This is obvious at objects of interest in the painting. The most dominant colour in this painting is blue, which can be seen in the sky, the bodies of the women bathing, the trees as well as the building in the background. In the painting it can be observed that not all of the women are associating with the others, as seen with the woman leaning against the tree or the lady behind the tree on the right.

The painting puts a lot of emphasis on the middle as the tress on both sides are leaning towards the middle, making it the main focal point of this piece. Not only are the tress leaning in the same direction, but the only women who are standing are either leaning or bending in the same direction as the tress. Most women on the floor are facing the same direction as well. This creates a triangle which also make the piece somewhat symmetrical. Something that can be noted is that all of the bodies that have been painted are relatively the same size and have very little variation.

Oona Hassim

Grand Central Station, 2012

Oil on canvas

35.8in x 35.8in

Paul Cézanne

The Bathers,1898–1905

Oil-on-canvas

82.6 in × 98.7 in